Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Cleared Hot Episode 47 - Mark Twight

Episode Date: July 16, 2018

Mark Twight is a man who has found success in many arenas.  When I first heard his name, he was described as an Alpinist, an expert in the outdoors.  The description did not do the man justice.  Mark was not only an alpinist, he is an author, the founder of Gym Jones, an accomplished cyclist, and at one time a trainer to many stars that most would recognize from movies such as 300, and Man Of Steel.  Mark and I met in 2005, while I was slowly climbing out of the hole that an injury from work, plus my own poor choices, had put me in.  Our initial encounter was "exercise" based, and the lessons he exposed me to still frame the way I train now, and eventually led to a short lived career in the "fitness world."  He is one of the most unique human beings I have ever encountered, with an intensity and drive that can burn most to the ground.  It is what I admire most about him.  This conversation was over 1 year in the making.  We both wanted to wait until we were in the right spot, and I believe we finally arrived there.     

All right, ladies and gentlemen, here we go. Cleared Hot episode number 47. But before I get into who my guest is, let's take care of the admin side of the house first. This episode is brought to you by On It. They have a website dedicated to those of you who listen to the podcast. It is Onit.com slash hot, H-O-T. If you've listened to the podcast, you've probably heard me talk about them,

before. They are a health and fitness juggernaut in their words. I think of them as a health and fitness brand that focuses on, it'll be the best way to describe this. Last episode I talked about it in terms of macro and micro, but they do a little bit more than micro. I would say what they are going to do is they offer you solutions that's going to help your macro goals. they have pretty wide variety of products. If you go to onit.com slash hot, I'm just going to kind of walk you down the page right now. The first thing you're going to see on that page is the Onit 6 body weight.

Now, it is my understanding that the 10% off from the podcast does not apply to that, but inside of that content in and of itself, what you're going to do is you are going to find a bunch of fitness related stuff, diet tips, recipes, supplementation stuff from the one and only Kyle Kingsbury, also known as the Pinky Archer. There's a lot of cool stuff that is in there. Just below that is the Alpha Brain Free Trial, which again, if you're listening to the podcast, you've probably heard me talk about that.

TPC or the total primate care, these are things I actually do not go on the road without. There's a morning and an evening. Again, though, these are the micro side of the house. In addition to having these things with me when sometimes my fuel or the source of my fuel is going to vary a little bit, this definitely helps out, but it's not my primary nutrition. This is supplemental to my nutrition, but it's got packet for the morning, packet for the evening. Alpha brains on there twice if you wanted to buy some instead of the free trial. And then the last thing on there is the MCT oil, which use with caution.

People probably get tired of me saying that. But if you use too much, you're going to remember that I did say it. And you'll probably remind people not to use too much. So, on a.com slash hot. They are really cool sponsor. They're supporter of the podcast. And if you happen to buy stuff from them, go through that route or don't. Totally up to you.

Now, moving on to my guest for today. This interview, conversation, discussion, I don't know the right word to describe it, has been a long time coming. I would say that it's been almost a year. and I met this individual at a very important time in my life. It was shortly after I was injured on the job. I didn't put in an OSHA complaint, but I was injured on the job nonetheless. And I was slowly navigating my way out of the hole that I put myself into.

It was not my injury's fault. It was my fault. and the mechanism that really helped me turn the corner was exercise. And at this time, before meeting Mark, and actually I should say his name is Mark Twight, and if you know who this is or have heard of Mark, you're going to understand how difficult it is to actually describe who he is and what he has done because there's so much. But I digress.

For me, exercise was a huge vehicle in my recovery. And prior to getting injured, I was just on the hamster wheel of back and by's, chest and tries, and then going for a run. Not that there's anything wrong with that. For the job that I had, I would not describe it as the optimal methodology. So when I first met Mark, it was in the context of exercise. And he really opened my eyes to a different style of working out that I have integrated and used since that day, that he came out to the East Coast when we first met. he is god he is unique to say the least he is intense he is committed to the things that he has done in his life and a list of accomplishments are pretty damn long uh he was world-class alpinist

and i actually had him talk about the difference between being an alpinist and a climber because i often get confused uh post or during that time period uh shortly thereafter actually i think uh it became an author. He's written two books, working on a third. He's worked in Hollywood. He's worked on, I think, eight or nine movies, starting with training the stuntman and actors for the movie 300 and then moving on into the superhero universe, Wonder Woman, Superman, you know, people who wear capes, essentially. A cyclist founded a gym during that same time period. I mean, It goes on and on and on. And we had not seen each other before sitting down to record this podcast for 13 years.

Like I said, the conversation was a long time coming. We really kind of reconnected about, I would say about a year ago, and started discussing it then. And we both agreed that I wasn't in the right spot to do it, given how few episodes I had done. And he has actually, or had actually, never been on somebody else's podcast. He now hosts or is one of the hosts of the Dissect podcast, which you can find on iTunes. But as far as being a guest on somebody else's, I was incredibly fortunate enough to be able to be his first. We had a pretty long conversation and it was one of many that I hope that we will have in the future because, honestly, we just scratched the surface of just about everything we could talk about. So I'm going to stop talking about it and let you guys.

Listen to it. Clear it Hot episode 47 with the one and only. Mark Twight coming at you. I will say this. I'm amazed that nobody has pinned you down for a podcast before, even though I know why, because I can imagine what your response was to each and every one of them. Oh, fuck.

The note I got from, my friend Brittany Griffith, who I like to call my climbing coach, but she's a dear friend, she's been on the, a normal cast with Chris Kloos a couple of times. And she basically gave Chris my contact info. And he sort of wrote me out of the blue.

And I wrote him back, like the total, you know, it was in 2016 that it's still the original email in the chain, as is my response back to him. I said, dude, I fucking hate podcasts. I fucking hate journalists. And you get a free pass only because Brittany, you know. You've a known quantity vouching for you. Exactly. You know, the bona fides are, have been established.

No. Maybe, whatever. And so now we've been, we've been, now it's been full on two fucking years. We've been going back and forth. Yep. And now you have your own podcast. Yeah. And so he, he, uh, contacted me the other day, actually.

And he said, hey, I'd still like to get together with you. And like, you know, I might be ready. Yeah. Finally. I said, I haven't done, I haven't been. have not agreed to be on anybody else's podcast yet. My first interaction, it is going to happen next week. Because this is, you know,

I think this email exchange happened yesterday. So it was going to fucking happen tomorrow, that I'm going to go on someone else's podcast. And it's going to be amazing. It already, if it really has been 13 years since we've actually seen each other in person, it's already amazing. I am relatively certain that the last time we saw each other

was the day that I left when you were doing the training on the set of the movie 300. Yeah. Because I came up for... Like a five-day seminar, essentially. Essentially it was. And so, you know, when I met you today or reconnected today, I pulled out, you know, there's a binder sitting in front of us

because this is audio only, obviously. But that binder is our initial meeting point. And that occurred probably a few months before I came up to, it was Vancouver, wasn't it? Montreal. Montreal. And it was somewhere up in Canada. Yeah. And I think that was it, though.

I mean, I remember coming up there smashing myself for like five days. You introduced me to Tim Rigby, who I still stay in contact with. Oh, cool. Awesome dude. Yes. Yep, we've jumped a bunch. He's, I mean, I started flying after I met him. He was already flying.

Crazy small world. He was like one of the OG. wingsuit flyers, if I'm not mistaken? He, I would definitely say he is one of the OG wingsuit pilots for sure. Okay. You know, there was a lot of people who went into the creation of wingsuit flying. Sure. All of which, a good point, are dead.

Either, I think, in testing or in actual flying the suit itself, but he was like the phase right after that. Before it was like the avant-garde on YouTube of, you know, everything, people flying. a few feet off the ground. He was quietly doing that type of stuff on his own. And they were, I think, at that time in 2005, he had, it might have been then or it might be a bit later. He'd showed me some video of one of their early flights in Norway,

which then became, that particular flight became a thing once people realized they could actually get out the bottom. Somebody has to be the first one out the cannon. Exactly. Those people have balls that you need a wheelbarrow to walk around with. Oh, good God. Yeah. Yeah.

I've met a few people that were active during that time period and the perspective they have between that time period and kind of the, I don't know if I would say it's accelerated now. Maybe there's just fewer barriers to entry because of information. And if you have a credit card, it's a little bit weird that if you have a credit card, you can go buy, everything you need to go do that. Yeah. With zero experience and then go do it. It's not going to work out well, but there's actually nothing stopping you from doing it. There was, I was working on an article yesterday that linked out to an old piece, and I can't

remember what the website it's on. It's basically the history of paragliding in the Pacific Northwest. and I was on the bleeding and broken edge of that, having been gifted for better or for worse, a paraglider and I think if I go back, it would have been sort of late. I'm thinking my first flight was November of 87. Were you gifted training with that? Oh, hell no. No, I got the package from John Bouchard, who,

So he was, his wife at the time ran wild things. And that was a company that was a sponsored by and B worked for. And he had gone to, you know, spent a lot of time in France, had been over in Chamonty that year. And it was like the year that it was just kicking off. And guys were flying, doing some pretty interesting flights in the mountains. And so he bought a paraglider and then he came back. And then he started making them because why not?

And then he figured out, and I think he was, he's just another guy who's, you know, fucking overachiever who figured out that if, yeah, if these things weren't square, they would fly better. And so he made the first elliptical. Yep. This probably started with semi-electical, then fully elliptical. Same thing with canopies and skydiving. Okay. Okay. And so the early ones, the one that he gave me, I didn't have the, I didn't get my super lightweight one until later.

The first one I got like the, I don't know, I remember what color it was kind of, and it was kind of heavy and bulky, but he said, okay, when you go to Chamon, you should link up with my brother-in-law, Manu, and he'll teach you what you need to know. So I did my first hops there, and then immediately got on a plane to Nepal. And then I did some flights. Where I learned that, because in Chamon, you land and you're a thousand meters, basically. You're 3,200 feet, 3,500 feet, whatever. So when you're landing, the air is fairly thick, even if your takeoff is much higher. Yep.

And when I got to Nepal, the very first flight that I did was above Namchie Bazaar. I believe I landed in the village of Kungjung, which is right around 11,000 feet. You're going to have to run that landing out. Why, yes. And no wind flag. You know, there are prayer flags, but anyway, so I did a couple flights. there came back. And so this article about the sort of talks about my involvement in,

in the history of Northwest paragliding and some incidents that I was involved in. Yeah. At that time where the paragliders, like, you tell people that, yeah, back in the day, the glide ratio was three to one. Yeah. So you don't get a lot of, you know, and that's with the small seven cell rig. That's a pretty good glide ratio and a wing. suit actually too. If people really flatten it out. Okay. But there's consequences to that because

you're flying slower. Yeah. And in wingsuit, energy is all based on speed. Similar to like when you're coming into land, if you bring more energy in and a paraglider, you'll have a better flare. Yes. Bottom end performance. So yeah, you can really flatten out for a three to one. But if you're going to train fly, you want to be under a one-to-one building energy, just mashing that gas pedal. So you can then flatten out and detach from terrain. That's how you escape. Okay. So, those areas. So you're, yeah, gathering the energy

into essentially a spring. Pretty much. The issue is, in a wingsuit, you get to use the spring once. And then it's like your health meter when you're playing Ultimate Fighter, if that's even a game.

I can't, whatever it is, do you have a health bar or call a duty for people in the modern age? Yeah. As you get shot, the health bar erodes away. Okay.

And in a wingsuit, if it erodes all the way to the bottom, you're going to stall. And until you tip your nose over and gather speed, then you start building it back up. In the skydiving world, that's not a problem. Thousands of feet. Sure.

If you put your feet up on the edge of a cliff and huck it off of that and you get to the stall point, you may not have the energy to refill that health bar, which is where people have what I like to call a high rate of speed collision with a non-moving object. also known as game over yeah yeah which happens at the end of video game

I mean I it well but the energy concepts are the same it's even the same in airplanes yeah as the airplane flies slower it gets musher the faster you go the more control you have in the wings because of the air going over and underneath the wing

I just that that three to one ratio is it's funny how there's intersections between totally different paths And I go think about that now and real you know there's modern I was talking with Andy Dorey and he's taken up flying fairly recently and he was talking about different you know squirrelieness ratings for the paragliders like like there's one that where if you just let go everything it flies yeah itself and you don't have to do and I guess that's like would be the entry level one where you know all goes bad you just put your hands over your eyes and yeah fucking like I don't think it would track it. away from a collision or anything, but apparently... It probably would fix the subpar human error that's being put into it. Yes. Because most flying devices get out of control because the human being is freaking out.

Which describes perfectly my experience with paragliding and why I decided at some point not to do it anymore because I didn't... I was too literal in my relationship with the world. I didn't like it when shit happened that I couldn't see. So... I could see that with you. fly into a rotor and, you know, the wing comes down around your ears. Like, why?

What did I do? I'm doing everything correct, but I'm not getting the output that I was expecting. Exactly. Yeah. Well, fortunately, you're not known. Yeah, you're not known for being a paraglider, which is, you know. No shit. Yeah.

Which, though, I mean, I don't even know if I could describe the things that you've done in your life. So even though, and I love the fact we went immediately down a rabbit hole. Yeah. We have to give people some context about where you started and the things that you've done. Because I, I mean, I met you back in 2005. And the number of things that I've watched from the outside that you've continued to do since then are, I mean, honestly, it's probably more things than some people would accomplish in a lifetime. And that is just from the point that I met you and our lives collided. So we've got to give a little bit of context.

So I'm going to let you give the history of Mark Twight because if I tried to, it would be very, very. Bad. And there'd be some missing decades. Geez, how... Start wherever you want to. Birth is a good spot. So there I was. So there I was. And just a twinkle in someone's... Well, where'd you grow up?

Well, let's see. So people learned that I was born in Yosemite National Park. I was born in the clinic there. They think, oh, of course you're a climber. I could see the connection. So someone might, it would be an easy leap to make. But so I was born there and lived in the park for two years and then lived at Mount Rainier National Park for three years. The common thread there is that my dad was a park ranger. Okay.

And, but he wasn't the sort of interpretive, you know, nature walk guy. My dad was a federal cop. He had a ticket book. Yeah. And, you know, and he got to like cruise, you know, It's Hence my issues with authority We'll get to those

That's later in the story arc of Mark It didn't happen right away It's true But it also means And so his relationship with the Yosemite Valley With Mount Rainier with the mountains Was more of an observer Like he was plugged in

He was in the military with Royal Robbins First son of You know some big L-CAP roots and Wayne Mary was another guy who was active at that time involved in the first son of the nose. So he knew those guys, but he was not into risk.

So he would watch with his feet firmly planted on the ground. Yeah, probably you know, with a warm cup of coffee, you know, this feet up on the dashboard of the Dodge Coronet 440 or whatever that, you know, cop door at the time was, you know, like you know, watching dudes through binoculars and thinking, man, those gays stay two more nights in camp four, they're fucking mine.

Which, you know, there are, there are some incidents involving my dad in climbers. And as my sister rightly pointed out, he was just doing his job. And that, you know, that is an explanation that has been used much, much overused. Anyway, so we, when it was time, like I never went to school in the park.

My sister was, when we were at Mount Rainier, she was getting on a bus, I think, every day and going down to a town called Randall where there was a school. So her first two years of school were there. When it's time for me to go to school, we moved to Seattle. So that was that. So I grew up. I don't like to say, well, people, if they ask me why I live in Utah now, I say because I grew up in Seattle. I can also understand that. Yeah.

And if you don't understand that, do a trip to Seattle. Yeah. and then do a trip to Salt Lake. Exactly. And make a choice. And make a choice. Or you can just avoid the trip and just look at annual rainfall statistics.

And that for me was ultimately the deal breaker for Seattle. For a variety of reasons. I mean, the mountains turned it out to be too small for me. Did you start getting into the mountains while you were living in Seattle? So we, one of the best things about growing up is that every weekend we would go on an overnight camping trip or overnight or day ski trips in the wintertime. And that was an important thing for my dad's. But I never,

I didn't start actually going climbing. You know, I basically, you know, followed my dad's observer status. You know, go out and experience the mountains, but don't, you know, keep the feet on the ground. Look, but don't touch. Kind of. And then, you know, but being in the northwest and being around climbing, I mean, something I was certainly aware of. There's a couple of books around the house, and one of those was like a time life book, just called, I think it was just called Mountains.

Part of a time life library of stuff, there was probably one on frogs or something like that. That one didn't interest me as, or maybe it was reptiles in general. That didn't interest me as much as the mountains book. And there was a lot of pictures of the French Alps in this book. And early pictures of early Himalayan climbing and that kind of thing. So that was my initial exposure.

followed by the REI catalog. There'd be like pictures of Messner or Bonatti or somebody like that. They're hocking some European climbing shit. Those guys look so fucking badass. I can't argue that. They did. Damn. I mean, if you could be like, I mean, you've got to be a fucking serious dude to pull off knee socks and fucking wool knickers.

You have to own it 100%. Yeah. Not only externally, but internally as well. And just, and these days you would say, oh, that guy just doesn't give a fuck. And I'm like, no, that was the uniform. That was the, that was a cool guy shit. They actually thought they were a cutting edge. And they, and they were.

Yeah. They just, yeah. So grew up in Seattle, first couple of years, I had some, well, I had some truancy issues in school. Yep. Especially after my dad left, which happened when I was 10 years old. And then I was kind of, I was basically, like, left on my own to figure shit out. And so as has happened in the, you know, people are like, you'll figure it out.

Yes, I will. You may not like the result, but you're right. I will. And so barely, I think I had a half credit extra to graduate from high school, which is the extent of my formal education, I had to split algebra one into one A and one B. Sounds like you were on my trajectory as well. Okay. Solid 2.6 GPA.

Public school system, not a day past high school. And there you have. I mean, and I would argue that one of the best gifts that I was given was the ability to learn. So if I wanted to know about something, I could figure, I could learn about it and figure it out. And that got me down, you know, the furthest down the road for climbing was reading and going to the artificial rock wall that they had built outside near the football stadium at the University of Washington. And then eventually, you know, I was working in a restaurant. There was a climbing shop or outdoor store behind the restaurant. And so every time I was on break, I'd go over and hang out with those dudes.

And eventually got a job working for, that was a company called Early Winters. And it was founded by a couple climbers, Bill Nicolai and Mark Fielding, I think, were the initial, Mark Fielding, Mark, anyway, Nikolai for sure. He had an architect named Bill Edwards, along with him. Ron Zimmerman was in charge of the marketing. They developed it, and Zimmerman was the marketing fucking genius. I started working in their factory where they made the tents and then eventually moved back and had a retail job there.

But got exposed to a lot of climbers with my very first climbing mentor. It was a guy named Dave Kahn who was working in that retail store. Good climber, good kayak, a really good skier. And, yeah, that guy, put me on the right path. I mean, in a good way, he was a super intelligent guy. And unfortunately, within basically a little over a year

of our friendship, mentorship, relationship, starting, he got killed in Chamon. When he was at a trade show in Munich, went down to Chamonie, I got a, you know, basically got the postcard in the mail, like the day before the boss at the work got the phone call. because that's how shit was back then.

Yeah, there was no text. Yeah. Yeah. Which, you know, it's good because the distance between when something bad happens and us finding out about it was not immediate. It wasn't like. It's a good thing. Yes. In the modern day, it's terrible.

You're rushing to ensure that the family knows before people on social media start blasting it out, which I cannot even imagine. imagine receiving that notice via somebody. Can you imagine like just whatever? You're looking through a feed and like my loved one is dead. Like that. Not cool. It hasn't that level of connectivity and that velocity of communication. I don't think has helped in that arena at least.

I don't think so either. And there was a point where, you know, deep into my climbing career where I would dread the fucking phone ringing, especially. the, I mean, if it was after 8 o'clock at night, 10 o'clock at night or whatever, like, the immediate inventory that was taken, like, the phone's ringing and I'm just like, I can't, and no caller ID, because, probably a rotary phone. I think I had buttons. Anyway, but, but, um, going through the immediate reaction is going through the inventory

in my head, who's where right now? Yeah. Who's, who's, who is out there doing something? And then, you know, either choosing to answer or not choosing to answer. and then like getting this information. And I remember one of the very first times that, and oftentimes it'd be like, oh, I read about it. And it was two months or three months ago that it happened.

And that's great. There's nothing to be done. Yeah. It's over. It's, you know, the accident happened, the bad decision happened, whatever it was. And there is, like, time creates distance and that reduces the weight. in a way. Well, all of it's left is you have to process it yourself.

You don't have to worry about any of the, if people have never been around when somebody dies, there's some mechanics that have to happen. And if you fight out a few months later, all of that is alleviated and then you can grieve. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And or, you know, pontificate, you know, depending on, you know, how bad the decision was or whatever.

But I just remember there's a couple periods, you know, where, and like an announcement over the loud, the PA system at a fucking trade show. That's called tact. Yeah. Good God. Like just, just unbelievably callous, in my opinion. Yeah. And I think this is something that has developed in a way of, I think we just used to care more about life.

and that's as far that's as close to that rabbit hole that I'm going but I think it has a lot to do with you know we'll circle back to that I bet yeah because we'll eventually get to that topic yeah yeah anyway the uh so um how do you continue your journey if a year into it your mentor passed um well I wanted to go you know the postcard he's like this is you know it's a picture of the drew on the front and that was what he he actually was climbing it with a guy they got to the summit by the normal route were coming down the rappel rope got hung you know wrapped around some flake when they pulled it or whatever and Dave was soloing back up to get it when he pulled off a loose block or whatever and went to

distance so the but the picture on the front was the Drew and like it was one of the coolest peaks I'd ever seen and so he wrote in on the postcard he says this is the alpine climbing snosier of the world I'm like fucking $50 word right there I need to go I try to use that word as you know as for a number of years I tried to use it as frequently as possible

because nobody knew what it meant and I was like fresh to that party but so it's like basically the alpine climbing center of the fucking universe and which Chalmani for me was and that's where the best guys were at the time and so I decided okay eventually I'm going to get there

I'm not on that road yet I mean he was such a much better climber than me I needed to sort of cut my teeth in the Cascades and a trip to the Teton's and, you know. So this is probably a good point for to describe the difference between being a climber and an alpinist. Because I struggle. I mean, when I think of climbing, I think of the climbing that I was taught, leading traditional climbing, gym climbing, just to kind of work on the mechanics.

Yeah. And I know that there are aspects of that when you are an alpinist because you might be required to do it, but then there's also much more to. being considered an alpinist. That's my definition. Feel free to correct. I don't think there's a, there is any correction needed

because right now under the heading of, oh, you're a climber. The number of existing sub-disciplines at this point is considerable. And some of that has to do with the advent of the indoor gyms and that sort of thing. So the alpinist, I mean, the root word is

alp, so this is basic. Basically, you know, I was engaging in something, a practice which was undertaken and developed in the Alps. So essentially what that means is like you hike up to the mountains. You fucking put with whatever you might need as little as possible, ideally. You climb the route under your own power. You know, you get up, you get down, you go home. And the, what developed sort of out of that was taking this notion of,

of applying the very minimal tactics of you only use what you can carry and applying that to the greater ranges. So the big, the tallest peak in the, you know, the French Alps, Mont Blanc, a little over, what is it, 15,885 feet, maybe. Something like that. Plus or minus. Plus or minus. The faces are all, you know, the biggest face faces there sort of in the 4,000 foot,

vertical foot range, generally, you know, three to four thousand feet, et cetera. and so you max out on the altitude. And the convenience factor of Chalini is shocking. I mean, I can take a cable car. Same for base jumping. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a mecca from base jumping as well for that reason. There's jumps where you can cable car up.

Yeah. Five minute hike downhill. Yep. Which is optimal in my mind. Yeah. Allow gravity to do the work twice to the exit point and then once again after the exit point. Yep. And that's the reason why people flock there.

And that, whether it's, you know, climbing or base or extreme skiing or whatever. I mean, it's, it's anarchy. You can, you know, basically you can do what you want. It's much more accepted in that region of the world. When I, first time I went to Switzerland and walked into the Laudabrunn Valley, I describe it as being a diabetic in the candy aisle. Oh, fuck.

I mean, you're looking at sheer walls and faces, and then there's the Iger, the young frow, the monk. It's like, I can jump all these, and you go and you buy a helicopter and for $10. Yep. You go buy a... Did you go Air Zermot or Air Glacier? Air Glacier. Good choice. I didn't even know. That's just the...

My guy took me. Nice. Go into the place and get the thing. Pretty much. But it's 15 bucks. You go to the local pub and you buy a sticker and you put it on your helmet and they take that money and they aggregate it to the farmers in the valley and so they will get offset the cost of mowing out for you, a landing zone and putting a windsock. Yeah.

And then a trail or a trolley pass that was... good for the cable cars, the trolleys, and the buses. And then it's foot powered all the way through the valley. I don't know anywhere in the U.S. where it's even like that. Actually, go back to Yosemite. Don't try that in Yosemite. You're going to get your gear taken. You're going to get charges pressed against you.

It's just such a more permissive environment. You might drown. You might drown. You might drown depending on your choice of E&E routes. Exactly. For sure. You know, the guy who taught me how to base jump, that was his mentor, that drowned in the river.

It's, yeah. And it's, you know, but it's, again, it's about choices. And it's funny in that environment where there are legal consequences. People make choices that skews the safety ratio towards being unsafe. I'm going to use my shitty rigging just in case it gets confiscated. I'm going to jump really close to dark where I can't see as good, and therefore they can't see me as well. I'm going to jump at times where I don't think the ranges are out.

Well, why wouldn't the rangers be out? Because the weather sucks. Yeah. So it's a risk, and it's increased, and you have that legal consequence in the back. head. You go to Europe and like, excuse me, ma'am, can I, can I jump off that cliff? And their answers, of course, why wouldn't you? Exactly. And if you die, they don't stop anything. It's not, it's, it's, I guess it's accepted, it's an accepted consequence of the individual participating in that behavior. Yeah. It's not expected, but if it does happen, they don't hold the other people

accountable for, even if it was a really bad choice. If it was completely an error on the jumper, nothing really stops. It just continues. It continues. I mean, and so my guess is, and that they have not removed the diving boards from any swimming pools in Europe. I have not paid much attention to the diving boards.

It's just part of one of my little pet theories about, you know, like some kid breaks his neck and they fucking take diving boards out of all the pools. So the last trip I did with Alex was to Lauderdin Valley, and in the two-week time period that we were there, 12 people went in, in the valley. And we would be like on the other side, and the helicopter would go.

And there was a couple that, no, there weren't any multiples while we were there. It was all singles, but day after day after day after day, and they made no attempt to shut anything down. They would talk, you know, people that, the seasoned, I don't, seniors, not the word, but the more experienced base jumpers tried to slow everybody down and just, you know, have some more talks about safety

and realistic understanding of your expectations and experience. But the exit point was right there. And if you wanted to go put your feet up on the edge, they weren't going to stop you. Yeah. It was a very, it was bizarre. For a couple of reasons. One, you saw that,

and then now retrospectively looking at it after what happened with Alex, you know, dying just a few weeks ago. And we were kind of texting on us on the phone. It's amazing the level of, I described base jumping as walking on a razor blade. Okay. And your feet might actually be bleeding,

but you might not notice it because it's just an insidious cut and you get used to tolerating just a little bit more risk. Yeah. Just a little bit more danger. I mean, if 12 people go in in a valley that you're in, that's cause for sitting back on your heels for a little bit and considering. And Alex and I did the opposite.

Because, you know what I was thinking, the back of my head? You know what? It's not going to happen to us. I mean, if I'm being totally honest, that's the thought that I had in the back of my head. It's not going to happen to us. Oh, he did this as this or, you know, or whatever. You justify yourself off of that razor blade.

Yep. and you justify the other person onto the blade with a deeper cut. And the reality is, I think you might have equally as deep of a cut and be in that spot. I just, it's so freaking hard to objectively look in

and realize that you're at that spot. Oh, God. And especially if there's some collective momentum around you, you know, with other people who are jumping or other people who are, you know, they were able to,

in order to sort of preserve their rationale, if you were. That happened because of, because of and you know that won't happen to me it's yeah it's again rabbit hole yeah but but it's but it's but it's true for climbing and yeah and and and the thing is i mean in chamonie one of the reasons that i went there partially was uh because it the very best guys in the world who were doing what i wanted to do were there yep and if i was going to stay in the cascades i mean there were good climbers in the northwest but um and a couple of them you know

broke out, went to the greater ranges I mean actually many of them but I just couldn't I needed to be around people who were much much better and a higher concentration of them and just being and just seeing the shit that was going down in in Chamonie at the time was pretty incredible I mean I got there

on accident my first trip to Europe first trip basically out of the North America was to go try and climb the North of the Iger with John Crackauer. He had pitched the idea and a story and had, you know, basically in a, all expenses covered by outside magazine to go over and climb that and, you know, basically, you know, write, the story of it because it is one of the most iconic faces in the world.

I mean, the thing is legit, 6,000 vertical from the, you know, top to the bottom, another, you know, rolling hill distance down into Grindelwald. I mean, when you're up on that face and looking out, I mean, you can hear cowbells and it sounds super fucking peaceful down there. Yeah. But it's down there. And that's not where you are. And by the time we got there, I mean, I don't know how many motherfuckers have been killed, but, you know, on that face. But it's falling apart.

I mean, it's the rock fall hazard can be extreme. And I can't remember how many people perish before the first ascent in 1938. but a lot of people. And so face has a big reputation. Yep. There's a jump off of it. There's a jump. I have actually filmed that jump.

Yep. Actually, let's see, one of the first, I think the first snowboard, snowboard exit off of the West Face. A guy named Dominique Gloves would have been 92. And just for clarity, you're talking about a snowboard base jump? Yes.

Okay, yeah, why not just pair things up? Yeah. you know you get like you get enough speed to get a little distance out from the wall sure what could possibly go wrong he'd only jumped one he jumped the quad of fare which is down down valley from Chamonie

before on skis and the skis don't catch as much air when you when you take off so he built a big big ass jump you know and went off and he and he tossed the laundry you know right as the skis you know gets off

get jettisons the poles the skis start to lift up to creep. And so on that jump he tossed and got out fine. You know, pretty violent opening. Didn't, nobody did the math on larger surface area, et cetera, of a snowboard. So when he, I have some pretty shocking still images of when he left the snow and basically tried to do a little donkey kick with the snow. with the snowboard. So now the air has caught the top,

has caught the deck because it's up. And so he basically opened head down with the board above his head. Above his head. He was feet high, head low. He was, yes, he was feet high, head low. Thing opened, hit the snowboard on the way to opening. So he opened facing the wall. managed to, you know, get shit right because the guy's a ton of fucking experience.

And, you know, went down and landed in the meadow and we're just like, thought about his life choices for a little bit. For a long time, actually, because we had some miscommunication about who was going to pick him up. And, you know, somebody thought that somebody else had got him and this and that. And so he was just hanging out in Grinvald or Alva Glen or someplace. Which there are worst places to hang out. Yeah. But anyway, so I got to the North Face of the Iger with Crack Hour. We got there on the late in the year.

We sat out three weeks of the wettest September since like the mid-1800s. And our camp, our tents got destroyed by the fun that blew in. And then, I mean, it was just, it was diabolical weather. Absolutely fucking great experience. And it was also the place where I learned how good I was. Because there was, and I don't know if I ever really, I think I wrote about it somewhere, but some, you know, John Crackett, he had a lot more big mountain experience than I had.

So I was counting on him to say, look, we need a three-day weather forecast, you know, of good weather minimum. Five would be better. It's not going to take us five, but, you know, it's going to, you get the first day of good weather, you wait for the face to clear. Second day, you know, you start up and maybe you sum it on the third day, depending on, you know, the tactics you're using. But partway through that, there was a,

there was like a day and a half good weather forecast or two days or something. And, and I left this party in the middle of the night, just thought, I'm going to go solo in the North Face of the Monk. Because, like, somehow I'd, like, you know, been drinking wine and thought that mixing some painkillers from the first aid kit might be good with that. And then really good ideas generally following the wake of that kind of And yeah, so I went back to the tent and packed and put my headlamp on and started walking towards the face and Popped into two crevasses just just to the waist on the way to the bottom of the of the face while it was still dark

Woke up looked back down or I didn't wake up when the sun came up I looked back down at what I you know my fucking Tracks through the glacier and like well that wasn't the smartest way to get up here but it was dark so I do excuse that I can't go back down or I won't because I'm no longer impaired in my decision-making capacity. So I got to, I'll just solo this route that Dougal Hasten made the first ascent up, first ascent of. And it was sort of what one would call an alpine ice slash frozen waterfall type route. And, you know, got up, got down, made the last train down from the young frau yacht back to Klein to Scheideg.

And... Kline to Shide. There's a great jump you get off. that train stop there. Oh. Then you walk down a little bit. Okay. Yep.

Yeah. To be continued on that, I'm trying to, you know, think of what that might be. But, yeah, that whole area. Anyway, so I get back down and crack around it. We eventually get a good weather forecast and start up. And there's just too much snow. I mean, it has dumped so much fucking snow. Christoph Prophy and Sylvian Tavernier, his girlfriend at the time,

start up the face, you know, I guess the day after us. So they had given the face a day to clear. We got up to basically the second, you know, the very base of this, climbing through the isos, got to the base of the second ice field, realized, like, this is going to take forever. This is just the upper face is, if it's this bad here, we, yeah, you know, it's stupid to continue. We crossed paths with Christoph on the way.

They were headed up. We were going down. And that they turned around at a certain point, realizing, okay, we need to wait. And Profi came, he waited a long time. He came back 10 days later, I think, and climbed the face in the day with Bruno Carmier. But we met him in the restaurant at Clonishite afterwards, and he said, oh, you should go to Chamon, you know, sometime. And so I think we exchanged information or something like that. And then Crack Arrow was like, well, the weather's, I've been here three weeks.

I don't have time to wait longer. So he went home. I caught a train to France. and soloed five big roots that in the next three weeks and it was the best because of how wet September was. And then it was like fucking good weather for five months or whatever. I mean, it was insane. So it was the best ice season I've ever seen in Jomani before or since.

Well, not before because it was my first time. But in all the years, I don't think it was ever that good. And so I fell on the perfect conditions and had just enough contact with people in town to feel like I could go back there eventually. And after I was, at one point I was thinking I would try and stay the winter, figure out, you know, the illegal bus boy job or whatever. Yeah. Didn't fucking speak of any French, didn't have anything, had one pretty bad experience

on the North Face the Grand Charmos and decided, nah, it's time. for you to leave. Yep. Because the trajectory was super steep. Like from the easy route on the triangue to the Gaboru Kulah to the

Super Kulah, North Face of Lake Court, and then to Soluna. I mean, it was just like, okay, this is unsustainable to keep going, progressing at this rate. Yeah. And so I should, I got a ticket home. How many years were you into climbing at this point? I'll just say

I mean I say that was my fourth season So I mean as far as a A season climber that's ridiculously early In a career I would assume I think it depends on where you are Your background it was it was it was ridiculously early For me having come from the Cascades And and not done a ton of

Um No big alpine roots like that essentially Like big big to describe the difference in topography between the cascades and shemone or even the mountains in Switzerland. It's almost just go to Google. Yeah. Put in the cascade mountains and then Montblanc. Yeah.

You're going to notice a difference. The first cascade mountain you'll see is Mount Rainier. That's a volcano and, you know, that'd be the famous one. There's a lot of really good, hard technical climbing in the cascades. But the infrastructure is just not there. Like the cool routes, you know, you're hiking a day to get to. Whereas the Cool Roots in Chamonie, you're on a cable car for five minutes. Well, don't forget the espresso and brat stop.

Well, yeah, excuse me. It does sometimes take a little time to get there. Correct. But so, yeah, it was pretty early in my career. I already knew that I was good. And that season in the Alps basically reinforced that. And I was 22 years old. Well.

You know, essentially, I think that was the thing that I'd written in my notebook at the time was like 22 was just a preview and you know in one more year I'm gonna bust this shit wide open um and I which is what you did I guess yeah I'm gonna say you did yeah I'm not even steeped in climbing but I I just had a bigger I mean I like to there's a lot better climbers than me for sure active in that area many of them were there I mean to run into like so that the the year after so let's see the concept of the enchantment

had just sort of been born in a sense and that basically came from the guys who live in in Chamon he read you know climbed fucking everything already and they're just like you know these mountains aren't getting any taller have you ever noticed that if you

climb the north face of lay duat and you go down the south face that it puts you at the base of the north face of the Agri Dilefra. And if you climb the north face of the telephra and you descend off the backside that it puts you at the base of the Grand Jaraz. Like, why don't we just string

these things together? And so the winter of 84, partially because that good ice season, Prophy had done just that. He sold the north face of Laidouette. I went to, got down the back side. I think it did it in the winter. We got down the backside.

It puts it right at the base of the telephra. It did that. And then sold the shroud in the grass. Grand Jaras and dropped down into Italy and, you know, hitched a ride back through the tunnel to get home. And so this started building up, okay, what would be the cool things to do? So the summer of 85, he climbed the north face of the Matterhorn, north face of the Iger, and the north face of the Grand Jaras, back to back, with helicopter liaisons in between. and it was fucking did it just under 24 hours.

He wanted to do the Walker Spur on the Grand Jass but by the time he got there, I mean, that would be the one you'd start with probably because it's the hardest of those roots, which later iterations of this idea did start that way. But the, and that just blew my fucking mind. I was there that summer when that happened and I couldn't wrap my head around it.

Like I'd done the North Face of the Island. that summer with the rope and two guys had climbed the Walker Spur in a day but had to sleep on top because it was kind of a long day. Yeah. You know, so we'd bivouacked in the hole. And part of that was, you know, the tour season. You know, there's like the last day of July and we climbed the Walker Spur. I think we passed 30 people on the route and slept in a fucking hole on top with 12 others.

I mean, just overcrowding was an issue. So the very best guys were there And that's why I ended up there And that's the only reason that it that for me had developed I spent you know three weeks there in 84 Four months in 85 I was there for about six weeks in 1986 And are you pushing the needle

Increment every one of those years You're going back taking the enchantment Like when I One of the things I love the most about the type of climbing you used to do It's just the ridiculously lightweight hard ass push. And I mean, that description that I just gave is not, it doesn't do it justice. Some of the stuff that I've read about the pushes you've done are the pictures you have

of yourself at the end of those things. I mean, obviously you have to work up to you that. So every year, were you going back and just pushing the gas pedal a little bit more, a little bit more? Yes. And I was, in the beginning, I was, you know, more interested in developing my technical ability and finding my way around the range. Because if you're going to start,

like the enchantments only become a possibility when you know the shit by, like the, you know, the back of your hand. It's not going to happen if you're lost. Exactly. And, or don't know that, okay, that for me to get, you know, like, eventually in 1990 did a,

one of the new routes that I did there was the Richard Cranium memorial that I climbed with Barry Blanchard. And I'd already, we got on top and it was dark and Barry wanted a bivouac and I'm like dude I've already done this I've already rehearsed this descent I got because I'm smart like that because I'm a fucking fucking chess player so I already know where all the rappel anchors are here we can get we can get down in the dark we can sleep and if we just get down to that to the cuvericleah we can fucking there'll be people will have left food there and there are beds and blankets and so I'm not

fucking sleeping out that's like so Canadian Rockies because Canadian Rockies. Which was where Barry cut his teeth, you know, and another arguably great range. And he, you know, had more sort of big mountain fucked up scenario experience, you know, at that time than I did. Some of those big mountain fucked up experiences that he had were with me, but he had many more before that.

And a lot of that is because of the nature of the Canadian Rockies, another mountain range that's trying to fall down. And the fact that you are, when you're doing stuff there, you are so far from the possibility of rescue that it, you know. You're on your own. You're on your own power. I mean, back at that point, eventually, you know, the sort of short-haul helicopter rescues thing came to the Canadian Rockies.

But at that time, when those guys were pushing, I mean, it took them five tries, I think, to climb the wild thing on the east face of Mount Caffron. like legit attempts with very serious guys. And so these things that they were doing were super hard. And but didn't have the speed component. And that was the big thing in the Alps was the speed ascents. And stuff, not like starting a stopwatch. And it's just like not I'm going for the record necessarily.

It's just like I'm really fucking good at this. Yeah. And so therefore my speed record is a consequence of my. ability and my imagination, my open mind. And you know, some of these, some stuff if anybody's like

watched what happened on the nose of L cap in the last month. There was specifically a one week period where that speed record got broken fucking every day for five days or something. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Wow. Yeah. And I think finally they went sub two hours. How high is that climb?

3,000 vertical. I think. And if you've never tried climbing, I mean, to say that that's accomplished in two hours, like,

I don't know. Be like somebody who has no experience flying trying to get behind the controls of the space shuttle. There's a lot lost in the description of how difficult that is.

Yeah, you can't like it's, and even if you described meticulously everything that those two guys have done, you know, to reach that point.

Fuck. Yeah, you're still missing 98% of what it actually the experience is. Yeah, and also the synergistic effect of those two guys. I mean, just like it's, yeah, unbelievable. But so the stuff that was going down in the Alps put me on more of a speed trip than a technical difficulty trip. And that happened for a variety of reasons. I mean, I would have been a much better climber if I'd really just given in and like spent a lot of time at the rock climbing crag and developed my technical rock climbing ability, but

I didn't because I was into different shit. And to the extent where I thought there was stuff that I'd some thoroughly non-recommendable things, you know, that I would not say to somebody, oh yeah, you should try and climb the South Basin Montpelin from the first cable car. Don't do it. I did I got away with it. I almost didn't. But it's, but basically you take, you know,

take the first cable car and in summertime or whatever. That's maybe 7 a.m. Maybe you get on the workers. If you're like plugged in, you get on the workers one at 6.30 or whatever. Still, that means you're going to arrive at the South Face month long to,

you know, uh, well, the sun will have been up for a long time, which is generally not a, um, the sun hits the snow. The snow starts to melt and snow melts and that unfreezes some shit.

And then, Some stuff sometimes falls down. And in any case, I was just trying to get faster and faster and faster. And part of the getting faster was reducing the weight that was being carried. Well, you have limited options. And that is probably the number one go-to. Yeah. And the thing is, it's it, you start limiting the options.

You sort of increase your freedom in a way to, to, you. Because anything becomes possible. I like to say that we were on this quest to find out how light is too light. Yeah. And not in terms of, oh, this climbing harness weighs one ounce or not that too light, but the aggregate of what you're carrying in the mountains. And sadly, the answer to that will never be known because the people who learn the answer don't come back.

Yeah. And, you know, you could do inventory afterwards. You're like, oh, they should have carried, if they just had this, you know, the batter- And again, that's hypothetical. It's the same thing with, with jump fatalities. You can hypothesize as to what happened. Yeah. Was it a gear issue?

Was it a decision issue? But dead men tell no tales. Yes. Yeah, it's a tough one. And there are some, you know, the, and unfortunately when the, when they die alone, then that lesson, there is no, just, you know, there's no ability to learn from it in a way. And I had the discussions come up a lot for me just because, you know, I've, I chose to walk away, totally quit cold turkey. What year was that?

That you made that choice? 2000. Okay. So we're skipping over a bunch of shit. If I, if I talked about the back in. You got to talk about the books. You got to talk about Gravel. There's, yeah.

But in, but my duty is that as a. I see it is to transmit the lessons. Yes. Because I did come back. Yep. And there was enough, you know, people who didn't that, you know, the guys that had fucking secret knowledge, guys that could have, you know, shared. And the thing is, I mean, if you're talking about, you know, 12 fatalities in a week.

Like 10 days. Basically in 10 days in Lauderbrun. So the average, you funny thing is like in Shalmani, you know, somewhere between 40 and annual in the mountains. A lot of, that data at the time is skewed because some of, that, that's like, you know, someone with no mountain experience, tripping and falling off the trail.

It's not like dude seriously pushing it, but the number of quality people who were seriously pushing it, who, like, didn't come back, it's fucking, it's unheard of. In a concentrated area like that. Like, if that, any of that stuff,

if one sees a, of that happened in the U.S. in a national park or whatever. Imagine it happening in Yosemite. Fucking banned. I mean, everything would be banned. Like, I'm sorry, you have to stay in, you know, you don't even get to fucking drive here anymore. You have to get on a fucking tourist bus at the edge of the park. So we'll drive you in and we'll handcuff you to the fucking seat. So all you get to do is see out the windows because, God forbid, you step out and sprain your fucking ankle.

I bet you they would shut down Yosemite if 30 people died on the face in a season. Oh, yeah. They would lose their mind. Yeah. Yeah. And is that rightfully so? Yes, in our culture, in our society, yes, because people can't fucking handle it. And, you know, think that, yes, yes, let's just say life is sacred.

And I'd rather be alive, but that's because I am. I don't know. Maybe dead is great. Maybe it's awesome. I don't know. I'm going to try to find out a long time from now. Okay. Yeah, exactly.

I'm not in a rush to determine that. But you've got to be ready, as Doug Scott said, you've got to be ready for it any time. Yep. And, you know, the reason I'm not into death is because I'm alive right now. But to have the number of guys that were really fucking good and cutting edge stuff. I mean, some of the early paraglider flights were, you know, cross-country flying is basically being invented at that time. You know, Bruno Cormier, who started Vertical magazine, he burned in that way. You know, Skofi's, you know, first accident happened in an automobile, but that is a, you know, the second,

one was paragliding because he got all fucked up in the car and couldn't do what he wanted to do anymore. Marco Padreini was using a sheet bend at the anchor so he could repel on a single line, which is basically as long as the knot stays weighted, it's solid. As soon as you unweight it, it fucking unties itself. And so you accidentally unweight halfway through a repel because of something. Okay, so there go. Taking the express elevator down on that one. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, and any number of guys, you know, that, and then when the whole base thing started. So how do, when you were going through that time period before you walked away in 2000, obviously you were in this community, which I'm assuming is small, much like the base jumping world. It's easy to buy a t-shirt, but it's, it's, there's a lot of people who have the t-shirt. Then there's a subculture of people who do it at a recreational casual level. Okay. Then there's a subculture, and each one of these subculture, get smaller and smaller and smaller.

Yes. So you have the casual participant. Then you have the person who is very, very serious. And then you have the person who is probably making a living as a pro. I would say, well, I mean, you were in the pro world, for sure. When those people in that small circle that you knew were peripheral too, when they would die, how would that affect your mentality going into the mountains? Or how would that affect how you approached the fact that you were going to go and continue

doing the same thing that took? their life. It affected me differently during different eras of my career, let's say, or different parts of my career. Because the first one, the first reaction is like, okay, if it's people, especially, let's say I don't know them. Yep. So well. But the peripherally, you know, acquaintance, met him in the magazine office, this, that, you know, whatever. Um, uh, first part is like, yeah, I'm involved in this really cool thing because people are dying. Because, I get it. There's the same draw to the base jumping world too. Like, well, yeah, it's awesome. Can't you tell how awesome it is? Look, these people are dropping dead doing it. Yeah. There is, I, in total transparency and honesty, there is that draw. You feel that draw. Oh, yeah. For sure. And, and that sort of, you know, in some ways, it sort of legitimizes the pursuit of the activity in, in some way, in like the young male ego thing. Is there one of those?

I have no experience with that whatsoever. Tusha. Yeah, I mean, it's relevant for sure. You know, there's that. And then there's the period of like trying to hyper-analyze stuff. We're like, okay, I've gotten close a few times, you know. And I could say that, you know, I mean, the accidents for me, that the ones that were, you know,

right on the cusp of being fatal, generally, there's nothing I could have known to, other than to not be there. Yep. Known better, I guess. Yeah. But there was no, there was no secret knowledge that would have said, okay, yeah, if you,

if the, you know, the ice, the inch thick ice over rock that your feet are on, if that plate goes away and your feet, don't, you know, are scrabbling, down the rock and you just immediately transfer all your weight to your ice tools because they're going to be both solid and one of those poles and you're left hanging by one tool, 2,500 feet off the deck, which is irrelevant because 500 is plenty, 100 is plenty, 50's plenty. It doesn't fucking matter in that situation.

There's nothing there other than to not be there. Like there was no thing like, oh, I should have had a different brand of ice tool or I should have done this. It's just a consequence of the activity. It's just, it's built in. And so there was a period there where. oh, that won't happen to me because he did X, Y, and Z wrong. And I've only ever done X, and so I'm not going to die.

You know, there are mental gymnastics required to continue playing at that level. If you actually value your own life, which I certainly during that point in my career, I was accused of not having a real value for my life because I was doing shit that that it would appear from the outside, especially, I mean, even within the culture of, you know, in Chalmonie, okay, the dude's fucking soloing at really, you know, pretty high level with some frequency. They could look, look, you know, in on that and go, okay, that's ridiculous. You know, that's just, that's, that's an untenable trajectory. We've all seen it before, and he's destined for the ground.

They start throwing the odds at you. Yeah, he did it now. He's getting away with it now. but eventually he'll do it enough times and something's not going to go in their favor. Exactly. Because it is. There is a,

I mean, I was just to describe it as a bank account full of luck, but you don't know, but you don't know what the balance is, ever. It's finite, you know that. That's an amazing way to describe that. And there's no button that says check balance.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You can, and you don't know how you're making deposits, but as long as you're getting away with it, you're convinced that you're making deposits into it. But at some point,

it just, It runs out. I mean, it will, and because it has for, you know, virtually everyone on one scale or another. So it's super cool. Now they get to the point where no, it's not going to be, you know, that'll never happen to me because. And then just infinite. And sometimes there's, you know, there's a little bit of anger in there. You know, like, we've had this.

Like when a guy I climbed with a lot, Philly Moore died in January of 1990. And or 90, sometime back then. Yep. 90-91-ish. And he and I had done a lot of simul soloing together, which basically means you're going up on these routes climbing together, but with no rope in between you,

no hardware, no nothing. You're just taking the same route. though just yeah okay yeah and and you'd have like a psychological safety net a little bit you know you kind of because it's way safer with a friend oh base jumping's not like that at all yeah you know how much better it feels to stand there next to somebody and look over and see that they're freaking out a little bit you're like okay do you know how much better it feels to not be by yourself yes and questioning whether this is a wise activity because if other people are doing it well clearly if I assign them some, you know, greater intelligence than I have.

Yeah. If they're doing it, well, then of course it's safe for me or whatever. Just like the even if it's an illusion, the distribution of risk, which is not how I look at it necessarily. It can be a thing if you have safety equipment. Yeah. But in that situation, the distribution of risk, it is an illusion. It's just like, hey, we're both here, you know, rolling the dice together. and the only safety net that's there is actually not a safety net hopefully one person would be able to survive to pass on what had happened yeah and maybe learn a lesson or maybe can you know tell someone else that hey you need to you can't just pull on every first placement of the ice tool like before you remove the other ice tool test that one and this was a thing that happened with philippe is that he was on a very sharp very steep trajectory and

climbing wise. When he died, I was actually in Seattle. I'd gone home for the holidays and got, you know, I wasn't the one to field the phone call. It was my wife at the time and somebody from her, she was working at the Patagonia store and Chamonie at that time and somebody from the office called her at home in Seattle and said, hey, you should probably be the one to tell Mark. So he was up on the Aguizannam trying to climb a new route with Francois Marceni, and there's a big ice field in the middle of it, and it's, you know, 55 degrees, 50 degrees, 60, whatever, not steep. I mean, it's terrain you should be able to run on in the right conditions.

But Philippe had this tendency of swinging the tool and basically pulling on it before he knew that of... Oh, he'd load it. He'd load it, yeah, you know, before testing. And part of the whole idea of three points of contact at all times, et cetera, you know, it's a rule that would maybe get broken, you know, flagrantly at times. Yep. By all of us, certainly. You know, in whatever situation you think you'd get away with it in.

But at some point, he swung the tool. And it was, you know, midwinter, hard black ice, you know, no snow over the top. I think dinner plated, knocked one of his feet out or whatever. or Francois never, they were unroped. Francois, you know, heard the,

you know, meirbed. Yeah. And then looked, we didn't see the exact thing, but basically there was a big dinner plate out of the ice where he had been. And then Philly point 700 meters.

Damn. Yeah. And then Francois, he was up there by himself, had to climb out to a situation where he could shoot a flare, get the helicopter to come get him. and that's basically how.

And the route that he, you know, he was not in a, like, good spot. The pitch, I later climbed the pitch that he had to solo to get to a place where the helicopter could get him. I was like, dude, in that headspace, after watching my partner pitch, I was going to say plus with the emotional. No, if I, you know.

To watch something like that happen and then have to mandatory performance to get to a place. Yeah. Or you're going to join him. Exactly. Yeah. that's a heady task for sure and and so there was like this and those are the kind of things like that would never happen to me because and it and there was there was a comment you know

comments made you know interchange back and forth where I'm trying to teach him because I realize this dude is you know he's going faster than he should in a way which was the same thing that was said of me because, and I would go back, say like, yeah, I did basically five years worth of climbing in a, you know, compressed into a two-year period. But I still only had two years of experience. That did not, that wisdom of that did not become apparent until much later in my career where I came to the conclusion that, man, in order to have 10 years of experience, you've got to have all fucking 10 years.

Yeah. Because the wisdom of those lessons, you can have, you can do all of the climbing, you can do all of the training, all of the reading, the conversations, this and that, you can accelerate the,

but experience takes fucking time. And you're not going to, you'll never get that experience if you're too far over the bars. Is it what I describe it. Yes. And the problem is you're still on the bike and you just don't realize

you're that far over the bars until you tap something with the front wheel. Yeah. And then it's too late. Yeah, I'm seeing it happen time and time again. Yeah. And so ultimately, after going through the, that won't happen to me because he did this and this wrong, it just became about the sadness. And the fact of, like, wow, these are, these are my peers.

These are some of my best friends. These are guys that, you know. They're your family. Yeah, in a sense, it's chosen family. You know, the family I chose, the group that I chose, and it's not unreasonable to predict that this is going to be a thing, that, you know, that it's going to dwindle. There was at some point in the late 90s,

I went back to Chamon to do a photo shoot for somebody, and got together at dinner with, you know, Andy Parkin was there. I think Fonsor Marseignee was there, Alan Gerson. And we're sitting around the table, and I looked at it on, and I'm like, we're kind of the only ones left, huh? I mean, as shit as that sounds. And it wasn't. I mean, that's dark and morbid,

but I know exactly the headspace that you're coming from. Yeah. And it didn't go. When I first quit climbing was basically around that time. Yeah. Whereas like, I can fuck it. I'm going to retire. Because I'm sick and tired of fucking, you know, my friend's dying.

And it turns out that even if I don't go climbing, they do. I just going to say that, yeah. And that was right about the time that I, got the pitch or the idea from somebody could have been the publisher to write extreme albumism and and that's actually writing that book as soon as I sat down and started writing that book I'm like fuck I have so much knowledge

about this stuff some of it you know yeah I can pass on now because I've been tinkering with shit you know for for years especially when it came to clothing systems and and the physical training piece of it and that kind of thing so I realized how much I knew and that I should actually go back and apply it and then sort of I would say like phase two of my climbing career where we really tried to that's when we really tried to push the boat out. I mean I don't know sort of what more to say on that.

Other than extreme alpinism was meant to be a how-to. book, but it really is a how not to book. Yeah. Because there's some, you know, it's like, hey, I got to come back. And here's what I learned on this fucked up situation or what I learned on. And I think those are more valuable books of how to, by the way. Oh, fuck yeah. If I had a choice between, hey, this is the how to and this is the things that you should

avoid. I'm going to start with the things that I should avoid and then overlay that, hopefully gain knowledge onto the, on to the how to part. Yeah. Better understanding and just a better lens of how to avoid. how to. Yeah. Yeah.

Because I'd rather, I'd rather know what I shouldn't do first because that, yeah. It's not necessarily, that's not what you shouldn't do is rarely included in the how to. The how to, yeah. If ever,

I would say. Generally, yeah, yeah, it could be, it could be that. So in there, Gravel came in there as well too, right, before 2000?

Um, no, that started, well, so they, uh, Gravel, specifically Jockino Gobi,

who had been one of my early sponsors when I was living over there. And so I had a relationship, and I don't know totally how it had. I think the French distributor introduced us or whatever, and, anyway, Jockino saw something in me and was like, I'll help this in some way. So I had a relationship dating, I think,

I'm just going with 85, 86, somewhere in there, with that company, climbed on their tools forever. And I was working on a book project for him. We were trying to do a thing. I was living in the States at the time, but I had flown back over to Italy in early 2000. I think it was 2001. No, it couldn't have been.

That would be 2000. I was there working on this sort of, we're trying to build like a world timeline of of climbing events that that happen in first a sense or you know huge jumps in technical ability or or things you know of of of that nature the personnel involved the technological parallels like was this a gear thing yeah yeah yeah when you put front points you know the 11th to 12th point on the crampons um it utterly changed ice climbing i mean i can see why it yeah it turns out an ice climber but i could see that a pointy end of your toe might potentially help.

Yes. Hold onto the ice. Exactly. So, you know, historically there had been 10 points under foot and climbing up steeper, steep ice was limited by those body positions that you'd have. Because the crampers evolved from nailed boots. I mean, it's crazy. So just the advent of the two front points basically allowed for the first of the

north base of the Iger. And so really it goes back that. far and and Gravelle had been around making stuff I mean since the 18500s well so you know from you know and and a variety of different steel implements you know didn't start with okay we're going to make ice axes and these you know recreational climbers who go around in the mountains are going to make us writ you know they're making garden tools yeah essentially in the beginning and and uh so they had all the So I was trying to build this whole timeline and chart, and it was going to become a book and this and that.

But the North American distributor told Gravel at that point, hey, we're done. You know, I'm going to shut it down. And they had been a good partner for Grevel for a long time. And I just thought, oh, well, I've been cobbling together, you know, with multimedia presentations and sponsorship stuff and, you know, an existence in the states that allowed me to continue climbing. But I'd love to maybe do this, like distribute this stuff in the States because then I could have a job that ended at 5 o'clock every day and I wouldn't have to take it home.

And I thought somehow I would be okay being a middleman. Like I'm buying it from Italy. I'm increasing its value by absolutely zero. And then increasing the price by, you know, 40% or whatever, selling it on. to someone else. Like, and, and ultimately that, I mean, we started, you know, started that business. Our first, and got a guy, realized, okay, I'm not, I'm a good mouthpiece, but I'm not a business guy.

So got a friend Bill, who was working for Black Diamond at the time, and he brought a couple of other guys over, Mike and Mike and Mike from Black Diamond. And we started amassing debt in June of two, 2001. Our first day of business was like January 3rd, 2002. Something happened in between those two dates that basically meant starting a business with a half million dollars worth of debt in a climate, an economical climate, which is dying due to circumstances. Outside of our control.

of our control, let's just say that. So, so yeah, the tower's going down, basically killed the outdoor market. And so we started with half, the company, you know, in the, from 2002, you know, till I finally shut the doors in 2008, the company was never out of debt. And to the point where, you know, it's refinancing the house. It's put 10 grand each on a credit card

to get through to make payroll. It's like, um, And, you know, part of that was, I mean, my business partner, Bill, Jockino was a volatile character and not someone that either of it. Like, he was basically my surrogate father in that. I mean, like, very helpful to me for a long, long time. And, you know, I held he and his wife up as, like, the epitome of, like, a, like, a, like, a, okay, this is how a marriage and sort of partnership should work. I mean, he was a very, very important person for me,

but in that environment was not great. And Bill found out quickly that he couldn't manage that relationship. And so he split left me holding the, you know, the reins. I'd like to say, I'd like to say bag, but whatever. So I got to, you know, be marketing and to, you know, to try and manage the business aspect of it. It's just not my personality. It's tough.

Business is hard enough as it is. I think about you, though, every time I go into an REI because they have the axes on the front door, the Graveld North America axes. Yeah, actually, it's true. That was actually a good sale. I think it was two for every fucking retail store that they decided to put it in.

The first time I saw it and grabbed, I was like, you've got to be shitting me. And I immediately thought about you. I was like, damn, man. And it would be like, you know, sales 101. If you can put the product in their hand, you can get them to buy it, you know. And so everybody walks in

and if they have to pull the door open, the product was in their hand for just a second, even though they're going in for, you know. Who doesn't need an ice axe? I mean, like you said, it is a good gardening tool. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. If you're not going to climb ice, maybe you're going to plant some lavender.

It's hard to say what you could do with it. Many things, it's true. And that was coincident. I mean, one of the advantages that having that business gave me, I mean, plugged into the climbing industry and then helped develop there was a point there where bids went out, the Marine Corps wanted to

change their climbing kits, the Marine Assault Climber Kit. And there was a company that had been providing, building those kits for them, assembling all the stuff. And I was like, oh, there's a fucking way smarter way to do this. And, you know, if you get this stuff and then you hire us to train you how to use it,

then are people so it was a whole period there of was that your first interaction and touchpoint with the military was it through Gravel? No actually so the very first interaction came by way

of shooting really yeah god damn it we're in the story is shooting you glossed over there because I know you love I mean I know you're you love shooting and I knew that you did I actually assumed that you picked up the a passion for that after linking up with the military people or something you were exposed to with them?

No. That. You're like an onion mark. Many layers. The smelly one that's been in the back of the fridge for a while? Pick whichever what you like. Yeah. Okay.

I'm the one that makes the eyes water. It's like what I like. So sometime, so part of the reason, I lived in France from, 88 to December 93. So I basically spent five years there full time on a 90-day tourist visa.

Perfect. Yeah. You're not the only one, I'm sure. I don't believe I was alone in that. I believe it still might be happening. People spend lifetimes there on with no papers. And part of the reason for coming home

was I had been back to the U.S. a few times and, man, I wanted to own a truck. And man, I wanted to actually not rent a place. And I'd been here, I was in Jackson, doing a show of some kind, my friend Brent's Hawks. It's like, hey, we should go to the shooting range. I'm like, ah, it's fucking stupid.

You know, that's some Wyoming cowboy pretender shit, you know, whatever I thought at the time. So just like with a podcast, this will never catch on. You know, I thought, ah, shooting, yeah, whatever, fine, it's bad weather. I can't go climbing. I'll go to the shooting range with you. he had a couple handguns, you know, Smith & Watson 9 and a 44 mag revolver. So we go and we shoot a little bit and I was instantaneously converted. It's a common reaction.

And I just went deep. I mean, right away, I started reading as much as I could, just that within a year I was shooting competitively. and and then got plugged in because Lisa's brother was a guy was a competitive shooter and earned his Grandmaster title

with a single stack 45 which it was a big deal back in the day like not a lot of Grandmasters running around the States who were you know it was to shoot Grandmaster category now I mean it's

They're all high-cap guns. They're, you know, it's hybrids of some kind, you know, whether it's an iron-sided stock, quote-unquote stock gun. Still, I mean, I think the 40-Cal stock guns at the time were, you know, 20 plus one or something like that. And so to, you know, even a 10-round mag was a rarity when Dave earned his grandmaster thing. So that means you basically start in each shooting stage.

And shooting stages were, you know, not high-cap stages like they are now. Yeah. But and so I got introduced to Dave and then via Dave who shot on the Super Squad with guys like at the time that I mean the hitters in in practical shooting at the time were Rob Latham who's basically still at the top of the fucking heap. Brian Enos, Ron Avery, Jerry Barnhart, Todd Jarrett was still probably two years in the future. But those and some other guys that I didn't really know. but I got introduced to, you know, Dave, he helped me out a little bit. And then I was, I first met Brian Enos.

I was on a range. I had a two-day sort of thing that I was doing with Ron Avery. And to learn, because I wanted to get better, and I had access to these grandmasters via these personal relationships. So I met Brian there and then, and then went on a trip to meet him in Arizona, met Robbie, Latham. and started shooting a lot with Robbie also.

And this would, I mean, I shot with Brian a fair amount because he and I resonated on a different, totally different level. And, I mean, he helped me a lot with my workflow, my systems, because the guy was a reloading fucking machine. I mean, it was amazing. You know, it helped me build. I spent 10 days with him and built a stock gun.

A new one, because I was going, moving up from a single stack 45. I wanted to shoot. I was on, I was on, yes. Which I don't know. One of the things I appreciate about you the most, I think, is your dedication to going deep. You have two speeds, deep and deep.

And maybe, yeah. I'd like to say. Do people are like that, though? I see a lot of the times people, they, maybe it's a time restraint, but they'll dabble, you know, or put their toes in the kitty pool. Even from, I mean, shit,

we haven't seen each other in 13 years, watching from a distance, whether it's photography, or the bike riding or the exercise science. Like there's no doubt in my mind how committed and how deep you are. And I think it's one of the things that truly is one of the things

that I appreciate the most about you is you're maybe it's not even willingness to do that. It's just who you are. And I think that's such a rare commodity. I can't help it. I guess is all I can say. It's the way you're wired. Yeah.

And I want to know the way. Yeah. And that really is what it comes down to is, is, and I can't get there with, you know, even needy water. So I, on the shooting thing, I mean, I went down that pretty deep and started shooting a little bit more with Robbie. And then Robbie one day he's like, oh, you're a climber. And I need to learn how to repel. And so Robbie was teaching all the handgun skills to a particular group back at Fort Bragg. Yep.

at that time. And so, and for one reason or another, for some of the urban work those guys were doing, he wanted to be able to repel off the top of the building and, like, and, and see the scenarios they might be confronting through their eyes, rather, you know, I'm going to get in. Like an outside observer?

Like a little Spider-Man action on the outside? Well, no, no, no, not necessarily. Like, say these guys are doing a building entry. Yeah. They're coming from the top down. Yep. But he wanted to make entry, like, not in an operational sense, but even in a training sense to, like,

be able to go to see what, You know, okay, how could anything that I know help these guys in this situation? No, he was being Spider-Man. He was watching from the outside. Yes. I like this guy already. Yeah. And an amazing guy, and it developed into something pretty interesting for me.

So he, so my connection, my first military interaction of any kind was to, was behind the fence of work. Bragg. Not a bad entry point. Yeah. And so he, Robbie introduced me to William Carlson, aka Chief Carlson. And they were kind of interested, oh, he's a climber. And so here, we'll host him. We'll come back. We'll see. We'll, we'll fucking just ring him out like a sponge. Come for five days. Give us everything you got, you know, basically the style thing. Because that's how you, you know, at the time, the long-term relationships with subject matter experts wasn't really a thing within the military yet. And so I went back there and they're, you know, I was sporting the crew cut at the time. And I carried a gun everywhere.

That was appreciated. The fact that I could hold my own on the range was basically what gave me entrance into. That was your bona fides for sure. Exactly. Because, you know, a lot of those guys, you know, spent a lot of time behind the gun, but I had spent a lot of time behind the pistol also. And they definitely weren't expecting it.

No. By the first time you stepped up to the range, yeah. No. And ultimately that earned, you know, the, it's like, oh, he's a climber. Okay, he fucking has a hacky sack and smokes a lot of weed or whatever. But then I, I then I'd show up and I can actually, you know, I can fucking clean the plate rack and, you know, respectable time and I could, you know, they could put up whatever scenario on the pop-up

range they wanted and I could handle it because I've been seeing these types of things through competition. And, and so that developed into, so the five-day package there and then we had a group of guys come out for 10 days to Colorado where I was living at the time and, you know, to teach, well, I like to say that with that trip, I taught them how to walk because, you know, they had, their assignments at that point, this was 1999. So their assignment, and their brief at that point. It's all urban. And so to take them outside

into that world was eye-opening for them and for me because it gave me the knowledge it was reassuring to me to realize like, oh wait,

I do know a lot about this shit and it could actually be useful. And this, you know, is pretty important work for me because I was born with a passport that allows me to go, or at the time, allowed me to go pretty much anywhere.

I was born into sort of middle class, upper middle class, thing. I'm fucking white. I had all of these privileges that I never paid for. I think I put them to pretty good use, but all the work with the military then took on a lot of greater meaning for me because it was a way to actually pay for, you know, to buy my ride that I'd been on already. And, and then to talk to them with those guys a little bit about some, you know, some of the shit that they'd done where, you know, I thought climbing was fucking cool. And then start to realize like, well, it's not the coolest thing because there's because if we're talking about you know risk and this sort of thing you know

the mountains are only going to kill you in five different ways and if you get a pretty good handle on that then then you can and you're aware and you don't get the short straw you're likely going to come you're probably going to make it maybe yeah probably not you know I don't know it depends how deep you go but but some of the stuff that these guys were talking about having done um you know especially later you know the post 9-11 stuff it's just fucking like okay Which is where your knowledge, I think, was so critical. Like, you describe it as teaching guys how to walk, having been on the receiving side of, you know,

so you get issued a backpack. And then these are the things you have to take with you. And really, you figure out on your own, well, where should I put this in my bag? There's, like, some broad guidelines. Sure. And, like, you just stuff it on your bag. Because, I don't know, I got issued and told I have to bring all these things.

And then you throw a ridiculous amount of weight on your back. Yeah. With no experience. and I would just call it scrambling or bouldering or, you know, because you want to talk about the useful application, just take a little trip to Afghanistan and look around a bit. You're going to notice some mountains. Yes, and you're going to be heavy at a base altitude

of sometimes six, seven thousand feet before you start. And, I mean, I remember when I first was doing that stuff, we had no experience to your level of knowledge. So I would imagine not only you taught them how to walk, but probably how to pack. I mean, there was, there was a good progression there. I mean, and later with, you know,

started with the Army and later Navy. I mean, in the end, it was, I worked basically with every Tier 1 SMU, yeah. Yeah, alphabet suit. Alphabet suit, yeah, plus, you know, and then the sort of groups from the, you know, similar level groups from the intelligence side and this and that. So I had it, I had, I did very little work on,

the white side after initial introduction to the Navy. But the knowledge that was passed on and later the R&D projects that happened out of that were things like, okay, this is why I'm barking here, is why, you know, I can't, you know, what's in my head, what I can share, how I can improve, a, survivability, but like just even quality of life, you know, whatever. Or efficiency. Or efficiency. see. And so, you know, you put guys like that first October trip, it snowed a bunch in Colorado,

but not enough. And so one of the first days was like, oh, we're just going to go hike up Green Mountain and, you know, I'm going to take these guys off trail a little bit and we'll go. And so there's like, you know, six inches of snow over like Broken Talas, kind of rocky terrain or whatever. So it's not enough to stand on, but it's enough to hide the elephant traps where you can like punch through and break your ankle. And it's not enough, you know, it's just enough to make everything slippery and fucked and to make like choosing a route through this you know quote minefield unquote impossible until someone goes through and tells you pretty much not you know where not to walk yep and and and it made me realize like okay so we've been working on how light is too light so

you know trying to do this gear equipment reductionism and realizing that hey the greater our skill is the less weight i have to carry for potential eventualities, if you will. So I came up, you know, part of the teaching point for me was, you know, what if weighs a lot. If you're answering, you know, what if with equipment, yeah, you're going to be minimum 80 pounds on your back going out the door. If you're lucky. If you are lucky, exactly.

Yeah. Because what if weighs a ton. It's a fucking ton. But then skill, experience, and courage weigh nothing and you have them with you all the time. Yep. Like, that's the shit you didn't leave back in the rear. you know, when you went forward. And so this is, you know, these were a lot of the conceptual things that I was teaching.

And plus we'd done a lot of work figuring out how to, you know, keep going for 24 or 36 or 40 hours nonstop at that point. And so I had a pretty good handle on the nutrition piece, which no one there had, you know, no one was thinking about at that time. Because fitness wasn't a concept. I was going to say, we're getting close to where you and I actually met. I'm liking where this is trending. And, you know, I didn't teach a fitness piece to that particular organization until later because I wasn't, I mean, necessarily, I mean, I had a piece in the Mountain Mobility group literature, which I think was called relevant fitness at the time because I didn't know

what else to call it, but the, but the, I just, you know, there's a full on, you know, basically 18 to 22 week periodized program. in extreme alpinism, which was published that same year in 1999. And I'd go back and look at that training program that I put together for what we were doing in the mountains. And there's not a ton that I would change even today, despite, you know, it being basically 20 years in the future. Because some of those concepts were, you know, universal inappropriate. And so I was, you know, I'd teach them some of that stuff, but we didn't actually run seminars of like, you know, movement knowledge. or anything because that for me came a bit later.

But just the concepts of, okay, of applying, you know, okay, I'm going to build the foundation of endurance. And then everything is going to sit on top of that. And there were definitely some temperament kind of things with the guys. Like I definitely got better with got along better with the reckey guys than I did with the door kickers. Because look at me. Well, they also probably inherently recognize the, more applicability of what I knew.

Especially in that era because we weren't walking extremely long distances yet. Because we would just like, I got this flying device can land right there. But again, every time we land right there, no one's here. Yeah. Maybe we should walk farther. And then I bet you when the walking started to extend, people started paying a lot more attention to what you were saying. Yeah.

From sort of, you know, even 2002 onward. So anything post-9-11 and, you know, every union. that went over to Afghanistan, realized that the terrain that they were in was not accommodating. It was not at all like training on the fucking quad. So then the expertise and especially it became what developed sort of out of that.

I'd worked, when I was climbing, I worked for a bunch of different manufacturers doing, you know, I'm a, it's called I'm a technical advisor. Sounds super fucking cool for, you know, you know like no put the pocket here um which you know i worked on a lot of you know ice tools cram you know the actual hardware for the climbing especially specifically from the ice climbing side with greville um and then a lot on clothing and packs and so for those i mean name the company i probably had some relationship with them at some point but um but mostly at the at the time i mean

I had just finished a, Patagonia had come out with their regulator system of clothing. And it was all based on an idea of not protecting yourself from, not trying to put yourself in a bubble when you're out in the environment, but integrating more with the environment. So what I called it was, okay, look, you're going to get wet. It doesn't matter. You can have, you know, your breathable, your waterproof, breathable laminate.

You can have the highest tech fabric that you want. You're going to fucking get wet. So if that's a given, how do you handle that? Well, you want the system of clothing that dries the fastest as possible. And if you have a constantly self-drying system, it doesn't matter if it gets wet because you know it's going to dry out. And if you know it's going to dry out just from your body heat alone, then, okay, now we're in a situation where we truly can keep moving. And if you start just, you know, making decisions of like, okay, I have, you know, extreme alpinism, I came up with the concept of the action suit. So whenever I'm moving and generating heat, I'm very lightly dressed.

And as soon as I stop in static, that's when I'm going to puffy up. And, you know, the concept of the belay coat came from that. It's just like all of these, a lot of this clothing stuff was developed in sort of climbing outdoor world. And then I had a friend who was working at Natick on the soft specials. projects team, he had done the original Spear clothing system, I think. Yeah, I remember well. And he was familiar with me from climbing and that sort of thing. And they invited me back and said, hey, we got to.

And it started basically in March with a phone call from Afghanistan. Some dude on a sat phone calls my buddy Johnny and says, hey, we're freezing our fucking asses on. Thanks for the Spears system. You know, it's better than nothing. But it still sucks. It's still, you know, it's still completely, we are completely unprepared for this environment. And so with basically within a very short period of time from that phone call, I was back there working on a clothing system that was based on the Patagonia regulator system that I'd worked with Duncan Ferguson on and Mark Galbraith and some other.

There was a lot of pretty smart people that came up with that system. But I went back, made a presentation, explained it, and the guy Fred Chan who, who runs, He was running that team at the time. He's just like, wow, this makes total sense. Why isn't anybody thinking like this? I'm like, because I'm fucking crazy. I don't know. Because the other thing didn't work, and I wanted to fix it.

Because you go deep. Because I guess, yeah. So they got a bunch of money from Navy to develop this clothing system. It became what was known as PCU protective combat uniform. And we did everything. through that whole process from the materials to the design elements of the thing to teaching people how to use it.

That's an important step I think a lot of people miss. You can have great gear if you don't know how to use it properly. I mean, I personally have had some horrendous experiences in the outdoors because I'm wearing too much stuff and I start sweating and then in my head and it's like, oh no. I just dug myself a nice hole. I need to leave now. I need to get out of the field

or I need to get into a tent because I need to completely control, all delete, everything that I've just done. Yeah. Even though I had the best gear of the world, I was an idiot, which is, I think,

what I'm known for anyway, so it's just kind of living up to my standard. But, yeah, I mean, you could have all the best gear. You have to have that educational piece that goes with it. Exactly. And we couldn't go around

to every unit that it was getting issued to, in person, because we did talk about it. Like, how are we going to get this? You know, I feel the team of, like, 20 instructors to go around,

teach all this shit. I'm like, uh, no thanks. I don't think I could, yeah, actually do it. So it,

um, I think from, I, I don't know, I can't remember exactly, but basically, you know, within a year of starting work on it,

it was, it got issued to the White Side Navy because it was their money initially. And then, and it built on, uh, from there. So,

um, it's amazing how fast the military can move when it's a crisis. Yes. I mean, it was, it was fucking crazy. watch it come together and to realize that also because of the fabrics we were using, there's some issues that with the Barry Amendment and that kind of thing, that all the materials

had to come from of U.S. origin. Most of our fabric mills in the U.S. were shut down. There were two in the, in the, in the, Milliken, I think, and Malden. There were the only two that could manufacture the materials that we needed to use. But it was the first time ending in history where the military had the military had the most advanced clothing system in the world. Civilian side had always been ahead, but this was by bringing, you know, what was at the forefront at the time with that regulator system and turning it, taking it into a military context and using, you know, different materials, some of which actually turned out to be better than

what was available offshore. And so that happened. And then parallel to that, I did a clothing system for the guys behind the fence at Fort Bragg, the Mars system and they had a bit more money and a bit more latitude and so they could actually buy direct from a single manufacturer

and that I think was a that particular clothing system really jumped started the you know Patagonia's government business because they were realized like oh wow this would be useful for you know forest services

would be useful for all kinds of you know users because they're fucking human beings and they're going to be out in the same environment so why not put it together and supply it? So the relationship for the military through that early 2000s, mid-2000s, all the way essentially up to, I guess, I mean, I started working pretty exclusively with your former folks.

Place. Place. Dog kennel. Dog kennel. Yeah. Yeah. There was a trip and I don't know. Fuck the year.

I was just going to go with 2003. They brought, they were doing a trip on Mount Hood. I think they were doing some kind of urban, you know, thing in Portland, like going into buildings at night and. Yep. Doing stuff. They're doing stuff. Yeah.

Poking around. Yeah. And they wanted to climb Mount Hood. And so myself and Scott Backey is Vince Anderson, Rollo Garibody and Steve House went out. I think there was like 20 dudes. Yeah. And we broke him into groups and, you know, over the next three days,

we taught them kind of what we knew and this and that. And drug him up the mountain like a Sherpa. You know, on day one, or the first day that we climbed like house, he was like, yeah, I climbed. And it was, I mean, it was super bad weather. Like, no visibility, total fucking white out, like being inside a ping pong ball and stormy and this and that. So, and I took the group of guys with skis.

And so Triple was with, with me Tommy V Jeff Swanson Yep You know OG crew Yeah

Oh fucking OG crew Absolutely And so us in the ski group We did not make it to the top that day House Rollo and Scott So I was with Vince And those three guys got their guys up And basically

Following House's nose He's like I climbed this with my dad When I was 14 I think I remember this place right here. You know, like compass and that's fucking, and Steve's nose and that was it. And and backies had come out and totally unprepared, you know, had basically a one of those like super lightweight three ounce windshields and, you know, no goggles, nothing.

I mean, it was like it, it could have been a bad situation. But that's, so that's when I started working with guys from your old address and, and that particular trip. The next day dawned clear and whatever and everybody who didn't make it the day before. you know, rolling on, I took him to the top and, and came down. And, and, and, and that developed a really solid relationship with, with that group. And so I would say that, you know, all the way up until sort of 2011 when, I don't know, most of the students, the line got killed. Yeah, they time out or no, they die.

They time, yeah, that they, there's two types of timeout. Yeah, that's true. They, they would, yeah, August 6th. Yeah, let's just say it's that. And so there was over a dozen students on board that bird when it went down. That was an old squadron. Yeah. And that was it.

The main instigators of like the years leading up to 2011, we did a lot of fucking cool trips with, we did two McKinley trips. Got guys from basically from Virginia Beach to the top McKinley and back in, you know, 11 or 12 days round trip on the second one. It was fucking, yeah, it was madness. But, you know, the main guys who were, We're really pushing the climbing piece of it, Heath Robinson and Rob Reeves.

Yep. And I turned over the climbing department to them. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well. Yeah.

They, uh, small world for sure. Yes. Yeah. I don't know. People probably don't realize, especially in, it's 1245 an hour. Is it? Yeah. Or something.

I don't want a sec. We need to have a beer break. Yeah. I don't think people realize in the military world, especially at the, the, locations that you're talking about that you specialize in working with, there's a lot of individual latitude to really, I would say go deep to use a term that we've been doing. And you can drag other people along with you.

And not everybody wants to get involved with the particular projects that you're getting involved with. So you get these little, again, a subculture of a group of individuals. It's already a subculture, but then they start dragging their friends along and you'll probably find the same names at the same trips. Yeah. And when those people, like I said, there's kind of two ways to time out, one being retired, the other one being getting killed, it's lost.

Yeah. And the focus will go somewhere else because the soup to juror might be driving off-road vehicles somewhere else. And people are directing their money, or the world might shift underneath the feet to bring it elsewhere. But yeah, the knowledge lost and that crew that was lost on that helicopter, I don't know if you can you can't put a value to it

No you couldn't I mean it just from my very limited perspective you know there the number of trips that we had done you with those guys I mean the

and some of them I didn't get to go on but the ones that were organized I mean I just like I have this great fucking image in my head of of rat warming his feet up on Vince Anderson's belly when they got too cold on Ockincagua. I mean, they, so that was a trip.

I think there was, you know, and that was one of the later ones, but, you know, Colorado and Utah a bunch of times for skiing and ice climbing stuff. A couple of trips to the top of McKinley. There was an ice climbing and skiing trip in Chile that Vince and Rollo and Bean ran, and then Ockincagua trip, so highest mountain in the southern hemisphere. and and yeah, I developed some really strong relationships with those guys. And a lot of that was not on, you know, sort of their drive because they were super into it. Also saw the value of it.

Some of those trips were total fucking boondoggles for sure. Maybe on the outside, but even on the boondoggle trips that I was a part of and that I went on, I mean, I went to a trip where I was Lee climbing with Cosgrove and Gerberdeen. Yeah. I'm climbing the bust, best deal crap. and one of the most freaked out I've ever been as I'm leading, and I suck at everything to include climbing, and I'm stretched out, like 15 feet above my last piece of pro,

wondering where I'm going to put my next one. That's really all I can think about is where I can put this. Yeah. And I hear a voice. And he goes, an exhale smoke at me. Yeah. Taps his cigarette. He's like, hey, just put one in right here.

And I look over, and Cosgrove is in tennis shoes. Yeah. I don't even know how he was holding on. to the side of the rock. And I remember just turning back to the rock and like, I need you to leave me right now and never come back and do this again because I'm so freaked out about what you're doing. I'm about to die. That I'm going to just jump off myself.

Yeah. And he's just like, oh, okay, just scurried up in his tennis shoes. But we climbed for, I mean, we climbed for five, five days all over Boulder. And it was a total boondog with some lean climber stuff. But the way I looked at terrain. After that was totally different. was totally different. So there's always something,

and it was amazing to me, or, you know, I did one climb where I got to the point, one of the guys had Gerberdian, I think had to go above, and he basically set up a hall system because it was an overhanging section, we had to kind of like, can't deliver out. And I'm looking at this, I'm like, yeah, that's not really going to happen.

Maybe we switched to a top rope at this point. But I watched what he put together, like a hall system. I was like, God damn. And then I built it on a ship one time. Like that. Yeah. He just knew.

And so I had the chance to see, it and ask a ton of questions. And then when we would do, you know, kembio or nuke stuff on a ship, as a lead climber, I was responsible for the hall systems. And I remember pulling back into that roll-a-dex of things that I've seen. I'm like, wait a minute.

Anchor point, anchor point, we're good. Get the thing, hand carry it right here. And it's like, so even though it was a boondog on those trips, those guys came back with a wealth of knowledge, you just may not realize how valuable it is until you have that aha moment like, oh, okay. But then also I think what you said about the terrain, your, your relationship to, to broken

terrain or Steve terrain totally changed because you see what's possible because a dude wearing jeans smoking a cigarette and tennis shoes just scampered by. And so his obviously, I mean, Cosgrove is a total fucking stud as is Steve. Yeah. But like the once you see that, you are no longer limited by your own possibility. I didn't know it's possible. I mean it's And maybe it only breaks, it shatters the limitation that you have on, on your relationship, you know, a little bit. And you'll never get to that point because that's, you know, thousands and thousands of hours and that sort of thing. But just to know that it's possible. Wait, he's a human being, two arms, two legs.

Okay. And a cigarette. And a cigarette. Put one right here. That's fucking classic. He literally, like, asht his cigarette, like, where he wanted me to put a cam. I'm just like, go away. So one of the jobs that I did

I think we did this twice maybe So go down to Arizona And do half day in the morning So the guys had come out And they do half day in the morning At the shooting range with Robbie And I'd sit in on that with them And you know get

And shoot government ammo And get free training Because why wouldn't I? And then I'd take them out rock climbing in the afternoon We're developing You know, hall systems or whatever to and and one of the graduation pieces was to do a multi-pitch route and you know from the and the belay off the top of the first pitch was you know semi-hanging so you're fully hanging on the anchors

you've got a little thing for your feet but there's no place to stay you're fully dependent and and uh and one of the guys and so I would have them fake lead and then you know basically give them you know give them a top of but they would have to you know lead and put the gear um in as if and then we take the top rope away and then they would repeat and then get them up to that that anchor and the idea was then to bring one other person up and then to reconfigure to keep going. And we're up at this hanging belay that I'd set up and one of the guys comes up and he's, you know, he's got his hands on the anchors, like the slings that are equalizing the anchors together. And so I tell him, all right, you're safe. You're off belay. And now you can like,

you know, reconfigure your setup so that you can bring the other guy up. And he just won't let go. anchors. And so I'm like, dude, you're going to have to, you might be able to do it with one hand, but I'd counsel, you know, just lean back, hang off the anchor, use two hands to get the setup. It's going to go a lot faster, less chance for a mistake. He won't let go still. I'm like, dude.

So I start slapping his hands. And I'm like, you're going to have to fucking let go. Look, this thing is, it's a, you know, it's a four point, you know, anchor. It's, you know, two are equalized. into one, et cetera, you know, this is, this anchor's not going anywhere.

You can totally do this. And I start slapping his hands. He's like, fucking don't do that. And I was fucking let go. And I said, what is the fucking problem? Because I hadn't,

and I had not seen this coming. He goes, if you tell anyone this, I will fucking kill you. I'm afraid of heights. And I, I, wait,

you jump out of airplanes, parachute. You fly around those little fucking helicopters, you know, standing on the skid with, you know, either the door open or is you're on the outside of the helicopter, when there's perfectly good seats inside. It's just like, yeah, yeah, I just can't do this. I'm like, oh, fuck. Static heights are a bitch. It's different than jumping for sure.

Okay. Because it's abstract. When you look at the back of an airplane, you might as well look at a pastel painting. Sure. I mean, I guess you can see where you're going to impact, but it's really far away. First pitch up, you can see where you're going to impact. It's not that. far away. It's not, yeah. Yeah, okay. I mean, I've, when I was part of the time that I did in France,

one of the ways I earned a living was working on this action film crew and I filmed a fair amount of base jumping and sky surfing. So the advent of sky surfing. I mean, Lauren Bouquet, Patrick de Gaierdon, Eric Friday, those guys. I think Eric, I think Friday's the only one still alive right now. But those guys, I mean, Bucay was credited with being the first dude to do it and to actually be able to stand up on it. Guys jumped. Physically be in control of what was happening. Exactly. And so I'd be, I'd been in the plane a few different times.

One memorable trip, we were 10 days in a lot. So they were, you know, jumping basically at the confluence of some borders that are somewhat contested. Or maybe they have been in the plane. past. And a lot of times jumping out of a casa.

So tail drops and watch the guys run out. I'd have a climbing harness on and clip to two different

anchors in the plane because I'm not going anywhere near if. And like I just like Andy, I cannot fucking wrap my head around it.

Like, so there's. So here's one for you. I don't like heights either. Static heights bug me. Until I'd go on like a climbing trip. Yeah. And get used to being around them, some more exposure.

And then I'm okay. Okay. But like 30 feet on a roof, I'm not a fan. But standing with my toes over the edge of a, you know, a thousand meter a cliff, I'm a fan. I'm still scared of the heights, though. Okay. It just doesn't stop me.

Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think that's it. And then having the relationship and being able to differentiate between 30 feet on the roof is fucking way more dangerous. I would agree. Yes. Then.

A thousand meters. Yeah. Yeah. I would agree. Yeah, because the good news when you're standing, well, generally, and I guess for you, when you're standing on the edge of the 1,000 meter club,

there is a means to slow your rate of descent somewhere nearby, if not, attached to you. Correct. Yeah. Or otherwise I would have like a 19 point anchor. Yeah. Yes. To ensure I'm not going anywhere.

And the rope would end like five feet from the edge would have to be leaning over to try to see what's going. I feel, yeah. Yeah. And there was, you know, for me, I mean, I started out, I had the heights-ish problem when I started climbing. Exposure was amazing for me. Once, I mean, I remember my first climbing trip.

It was actually with Barclow. Okay. Took Jason and I out to J-Tree and it was like, God, I don't know. You just, you know, and it was the first time I'd ever set pro and we were aid climbing. I just felt sketched out the first day. And the fourth day, you're like, okay, but it just was that exposure and that comfortable environment. But then I'd wait a year and go on another trip.

And the first day, I'm like, it's back. Yeah. It's a perishable. relationship in a way, not just a, not just a skill. But and it's interesting to hear that. Like, I never got to the point. Like, I quit paragliding because shit would happen that I couldn't see. Whenever there was this skydiving thing or the base jump thing, it never, it just, like, I've spent my entire career trying to hang on. That's a good way to look at it. And now I'm going to face out and fucking jump, you know, I mean, I did get, it, the elasticity of the mind

me is fucking amazing because I suppose if I was like, Andy, I want to jump out of a plane. Perfect. I know where to go. We're 30 minutes away. Okay. So say that that happened. It just did. It did. If that ever were to happen, there are two people that I would actually trust and ask. You are one of them. Perfect. And triples the other. That would be a good way to go about that because he taught me how to do tandoms as it is. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

You've been good hands. I believe that that would be the case. But I could see that going from, okay, I, guys, I'm, don't tell anybody I'm wearing a diaper for that first jump, for sure. I could see, you know, the acceleration of, like, if you get interested in it, then. You would go deep. And, yeah, I know which things to stay away from in, for me. Yeah. I know that you would

because I think in some ways you and I definitely have a similar personality trait I have a very hard time not completely committing to something new an example would be what I'm doing in Salt Lake I'm here to shoot in an archery competition I've had a bow for like a year but I shoot every day

and I want to know how the bow works and how to make the arrows and then I want to go on a hunting trip but then I also want to research it's like I don't have two speeds and it drives my wife absolutely bad shit crazy because she'll

see a new topic show up on the desk. She's like, what, what's that book? Oh, no. Yeah. Why do you have a book about wakeboarding? Like, because I'm curious. She's like, oh, God. Oh, my God. There's a boat in the driveway. It happened. Oh, I know. Well, you know, it's funny. It happened with when you and I met in 2005. You, uh, I met you at a very interesting time in my life. The trajectory on where I thought my life was going and then the physical situation that I, you know, was in when I met you were very different. And my career at that old address ended shortly thereafter. But I do think that having you come and teach the physical training aspect, when did you start

doing those seminars, by the way? Around that time? Fuck. Because I know you went deep on fitness too. Yeah. The very first military one, I don't know when, I mean, as far as like this, you the first time we were asked to do fitness thing. Yeah, something like you put on at the command.

Yeah, it may, that may have been the, no, because I did do 2004, I did, so I met Greg November of 2003. Okay. And had, you know, and basically started our gym in December of that year. And so I would say that, It was 2004, been the first fitness seminar I did for the military. Yep. At the time, you know, since I was working with various white side elements,

you know, I, you know, made some introductions, you know, to, like, I carried water where, you know, Greg couldn't. Well, you had inroads where he did not. Well, exactly. Yeah. And so that first thing there, Bragg, the first, it was an actual CrossFit seminar. I did a five-day seminar. I wrote, you know, I did, used all the curriculum from what I was doing from relevant fitness plus stuff that I'd learned. And then developed a test, like you had to test out, which was not happening at seminars.

I still don't think it does necessarily, but I don't believe it does either. I've written tests, but I don't think there's a practical test, at least at the, at the first entry gate. I am a few years out of it. Yeah. But I don't believe there's a, there, I know there's a written, but I don't think there's a practical.

Okay. Yeah. And so I think we, I had six guys there. I think four passed and, you know, the certificates were issued for basically what, and I don't know, I don't remember exactly if it, if they called the five day seminar a level one or a level two. I mean, it covered pretty much every, you know,

everything there. So that would have been the, the, the first sort of very specific fitness thing would have been 2004. And so, when I came back to see you guys would have been one year later. Yeah, because I got hurt in 2005 and found you and then later on CrossFit and met Greg through the introduction to you to the methodology through, I'm pretty sure it was Dennis who introduced me to you and the sparrow.

And yeah, you guys came out for that course. And I know for a fact that that is true, the sparrow came with me. And but I think back, it was a very, I mean, we were in the small conference room. I was trying to figure out ways to rehab from getting shot. Yeah. Because the Navy's rehab was here's an e-stem pad, turn it on for an hour. Like, oh, okay. I don't know anything.

How does that nerve regrowth going? Sucks. I still can't feel my left leg from the kneecap down. And I have issues with, uh, still a little drop foot thing. Um, I can rotate my, I can bring my foot up, but it rotates up into the inside a little bit. Okay. Like my climbing days are over.

I can no longer load my left foot. because if there's any inclination for it to roll to the outside, once it starts, I can't stop it. Okay. So I can man, like I can snowboard and I can do a lot of linear stuff, like straightforward, and I can do side to side, but I have to be cautious. There's not a lot of angular velocity where it's quick speed and then make a cut. And make a cut kind of thing. So when you're like getting to some of these exits, you're walking on rough terrain. Oh, yeah.

How much? I'm a spider monkey, goddammit. Do you brace up that ankle to keep it from rolling? I've tried to do that. I've tried everything from ACE wrap to the hard plastic. You've got an inside, outside with the Velcro. I find with the inside, outside plastic sheath with the Velcro, what I get is blisters because it wears in weird places.

And it still wants to start to roll. If I load it too much, it still wants to start to roll. So it still shifts my balance enough that if I was in a really, really bad spot, I might not be able to stop it. Okay. So, you know, you talk about route selection. I'm looking way ahead of where I'm going. Yeah.

And I know that, you know, if I'm walking towards you, terrain that is sloping from my right down to my left is the most dangerous terrain for me. Yeah. And so I just angle a little bit differently. And I'm really slow. You know, getting to the exit point is actually my favorite part. And I saw my favorite part because flying as a human being is pretty goddamn fun. But the walking to the exit point,

is like 98% of base jumping. It just doesn't show up on YouTube. Sure. You know, to go back to talk with Alex, we used to do the low Youngfrau and the high young frow jump in the valley. We'd hike for two and a half hours for 60 seconds of flight.

Yeah. I mean, the ratio of flight, which is not even really flight, it's falling, gliding at best. Okay. But the ratio of that to hiking is so askew, but the hiking's really boring, which is why it doesn't make the YouTube

highlight real. Maybe a little snippet. everybody almost all base jumping videos you hear the beep and it starts about 15 seconds before the exit and then it stops when their feet hit the ground if not when their parachute opens that the other the terrain and the hiking that's where I had I'd say the most enriching experiences with Alex were in those times because fuck we talked about life yeah you know we were both out of the military trying to figure out what the hell we were going to do we'd bounce business ideas off each other and then we get to an exit point I'd look up like hey man

you're doing all right I'm peeking out of my mind I'm like, okay, cool, me too. Nice. Means we're both paying attention. Don't do anything stupid, okay? And then, yeah, I mean, that's what I'll miss more than anything in that experience with him. But so I'm cautious. Long the way around to say, I'm very cautious.

And I'll take trekking poles too. And I just really, in that, I mean, just in and of itself helps with carrying the weight. I mean, probably 10 to 15% efficiency improvement. And you can collapse them and I put them inside of the wing suit. So. Oh, yeah. The backpacks we're wearing when we jump. Yeah. There's no goodwill.

donation box up top. So everything you hike up, you have to put inside of the suit. Yeah. So some people have like ski poles going down their legs. Okay. There's a backpack. There's a, it's called a nut sack. It's awesome. It's a zip up pouch right below your nut sack. And you can put your bag in there. It's, it's, it's, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I guess the the, the question, you know, the equivalent question when people ask climbers, how do you get the rope up there? would be like, hey, how do you get all that shit down? You fucking fly it. You fly it and you, what's funny is you start becoming very selective as to what you will take up.

I need a collapsible water bottle. I don't need this big Nalgene. Yeah. How did I learn that lesson? Well, I left Nalgian for the Goodwill box that's not there. But I set fresh, delicious Swiss spring water. And I'm sure somebody has it now. Yeah.

And the next thing you know, you have a roll up, you know, and then your stuff sack, the big backpack that you're carrying around, you realize I need to go as thin as humanly possible. I don't need padding on my shoulders. It's only a couple hours. I don't need this big waistband. What I need is something. Because it has to collapse into...

Yes, I need a sandwich bag sized duffel bag that I can put my stuff in. And then an extra t-shirt and you're good. Or maybe a Gortex jacket or something for the elements. The reality is you're only going to be out there for a couple hours. And if you had to, you could hike down. I mean, in Switzerland, I can see the damn village the entire time. I'm going to get out.

I'll call out if I have to. You know, just as kind of a joke, how big is the first aid kit? Well, it's pretty tiny. The injuries that you're going to sustain, I mean, the reality is the injuries that you're going to sustain on the way up would probably be

shortfall related. Yeah. A roll, sprain or break. And the injuries on the way down are going to be fatal. So you really only need a first aid kit for the way up. And I mean, if you know anything, you know, the ability to splint or, you know, the reality is too in Switzerland. Like I said, you go to Air Glacier.

Yeah. I can call them on my phone. I have cell coverage the entire way. So the first aid kit is the size of my iPhone. You know what? There you have it. Stabilize. Call the helicopter for the 15 bucks.

It's like $10 million or not $10 million. You know what? It might be $10 million of insurance and they'll come and pluck you right off the cliff. Yeah. It's the way down. that gets you and no first aid kit puts anything back together at 120 miles an hour. Nope. Yeah, it's, but again, none of that on, none of that on the YouTube videos.

It's, to me, and I'm sure climbing has to be the same way. There's so many more rabbit holes, or there's so much more depth and breath to what makes it all possible as to what is, as opposed to what people can consume and understand about what's actually happening. And the, you know, a lot of times the good bits are when you're sitting on a ledge, Oh my God. At night. Yeah.

Without appropriate. Suffering. Insulation. Just talking shit with your partner trying to, you know, like. Which is, um, some stuff that's tried to be recreated and that the, I mean, K2 was the, the documentary. Yes, K2. I saw it. Um, yeah, there was.

You know, that didn't turn out that well for that many people. Yeah. But anyway, but those moments of sort of sitting there and talking. When you, when you've like, or being with someone who has seen your belly. Yeah. Who has seen you scared out of your fucking mind. At your lost moment. Yeah.

And then there's no hiding. And then you get to have, then you're totally free to talk. And, and, you know, it's, and those are the things. It's not, you know, I don't go out and purposely try to spend a cold, shitty night on the of a mountain. But that can be a consequence. Actually, I think I only ever, I only ever had one unplanned bivouac

in the mountains the entire time. Seems like a really low number for how long your career was. Yeah, and the fact I just liked sleeping at home, which is also part of the whole speed trip was like, like, let's get this fucking done. Because then we don't, like, and if you're not planning to sleep,

then obviously the weight that you're carrying is reduced as well. And some things you need, they have to be done. They have to be approached with a certain amount of technology or it's going to take a certain amount of time. This route that I did with Andy Park. And eventually in Chamon, called Beyond Good and Evil, when we succeeded, it was our fourth try. And the first attempt, I was actually up with Christoph Boduan because Andy had I had drawn my eye to this

fucking line of ice splitting this fucking big rock face and so I went up with Christoph to kind of look at it and we climbed a couple of pitches and realized okay this is I realized like Christoph is not the partner for this he might be a little over his head

yeah yeah or I would more responsibility would fall on me and I considered that route to be pretty close to the edge of what I was able to do at the time. So I couldn't be looking after someone else. I need an equal or better partner for that. And then Randy and I made two attempts to do it in a day. And the climbing was hard enough and technical enough that we were moving slow.

And the time of year when this route is going to get done, it's either autumn, you know, late autumn or in the springtime. It's too dry in the winter. But anyway, but they're short days when you could actually go do it. It's not the height of summer. There's no ice there in the summer. So it's got to be cold. The days have got to be a little bit short.

So we realized, okay, we can't climb this in a day. We've only managed to get six pitches up. What we think is going to be 11 or 12 pitch route. It's 1,800 feet vertical. And so when we made the fourth temp, we came back and just resolved, okay, we're going to spend a night. Fine. And that ended up being the key. these days that that route's routinely done in a day and routinely the last two pitches one of which is really really fucking dangerous don't get don't get done but it's but it's also i mean in 2013 it would have been the 21 year anniversary of that route getting having its first ascent and so a lot of shit has changed in the meantime not the least of which that just more collective knowledge

Does the ice form in a similar way every year? Because I'm assuming it melts off in the summertime. Is it like you go a year, you're unsuccessful, you come back? Is it like 90% the same? Or do you have to completely reassess? You can, it will form thicker, thinner, more or less, whatever, according to environmental conditions. So you could have a year where on that particular route for sure, you look at it from the valley and you go, it's in. And you go up there and it's basically powder snow.

it has not become ice yet. It's either it's been too cold or whatever. So the conditions that we actually did the root in, I don't think I've ever seen any less ice on the face than when we, I mean, any less ice and the route got done. Yeah. At the same time. Because generally when Francois D'Alano and Francois-Marcini did the second descent,

and I can't remember if it was two years later or three or whatever. But the ice conditions they had, I mean, like we're talking about, let's say in a vertical corner of sort of a 90-degree corner where the door is over there. And you can imagine a run all of ice that's no wider than a foot wide in that corner.

Oh, wow. And some of that coming away because it's not well-supported and that sort of thing to, you know, flash forward to, second ascent and the conditions people are looking for, that is a six foot wide curtain of ice. So Montreal, indeed. Montreal destroyed myself for like five days. And then we kind of detached a little bit.

You, I went one route. You continued down the route through Iran, founded Jim Jones, best gym name ever. And I mean, you were, again, deep. to use the same where we've been using over and over again. Deep into that. And again, this is where I kind of started watching from afar. So when did the bike come into that?

Because then I remember you going through this phase of just cranking out the miles on the bike. So I'd fell in a rock gym in 1993 and fucked up my left shoulder and had kept it, held it together for 13 years on, you know, you know, rehab and strengthening, basically, and gritting my teeth. And so in October 2006, I was on a job in the Teton's. Some characters you will know. The Motley crew. The Motley crew. Let's see.

I mean, I could go through. The memory of, I mean, the guys, I remember that trip. the most is because Bean Bowers was with us on that trip who he is no longer with us. Mark Carter was with us also who was no longer around. And those are two guys on that particular trip. But anyway, I basically ruptured my biceps tendon. And the biceps tendon was the only thing really holding my shoulder together, it turned out. So rupture the top down.

All pain immediately went away. but my shoulder got super unstable. I came back down here to Salt Lake, had to visit with the doctor and full shoulder reconstruction. And so I had six weeks of basically hugging a pillow during rehab. And I was like, well, I need to stay fit. I need something.

So I set up a bike that I had on a fucking turbo trainer in the garage and started. Got tired of the scenery? Got tired of the, yeah, exactly. Definitely. I got tired of that scenery. And then realized like, oh, wait, this is actually a thing. Guys ride through the winter in Utah in their garages.

And oftentimes they watch old, like, bike racing DVDs or whatever. And so I got, like, a DVD of, like, the 2004 or something, 2002. I don't know. It was some tour. Tour to something? Tour to something. You ordered a spandex suit right after that, didn't you? I was already wearing one.

Yes. I knew it. Oh, yeah. it's it's uh it's you know it's part of going deep into the culture you have to full immersion yeah exactly so um so it developed out of that and then in in february 2007 like i'd spent all fucking winter pedaling my you know to nowhere and so in february of 2007 so whatever had been like totally rehabbed and i could actually it was clear to go ride outside and do some other shit but i go I went to the orthopedic, especially a hospital here, where Max Testa was, he'd started a sports medicine kind of clinic there.

And I decided, well, fuck, I want to go get some kind of like, you know, because I've done, I had already been down the science route of doing sort of lactate and V-O-2 max testing and that kind of thing. I decided, well, I want to go see if I can, you know, see if it's any different on the bike than, you know, has been for, you know, hiking uphill or whatever. And so I go in and we do the little test And it turns out, you know, Max lived in Kormeyer for a while, which is just across the Mont Blanc-Massie from Shumany Because his dad taught at the Alpine military school there and that So we like connected on a really on a nice level I gave him an Italian version of Kiss or Kill to read And the test results came back and he said, you know You could if you paid attention you could actually do okay

It's almost like you have this base of endurance It's amazing. Or something, yeah. And so 2007 was my first season bike racing, and I raced consistently through 2010. Did a few races in 2011 once, but as soon as I went deep into the movie jobs. I was going to say concurrently while you were doing this,

you were also, I would say behind the scenes, working with the actors that are on the posters, selling the movies. That came a little bit later. So after 300, which was a transformative experience on by all accounts, I mean on all levels, but I didn't like the vibe around the business itself. And so after that was done, I told Zach, look, I'm not going to, this was great. Thank you for the opportunity, but I can't do this again because I've seen some people behave really badly and be rewarded for it. And that's fucked in my world.

So it's an interesting ecosystem. I've only been peripheral to it, but I've seen exactly. the same thing. It's, I mean, 99.9% blue collar. People work in their asses off. Yep. And 0.01% the star. Yeah. And the behavior acceptance between those two groups is very bizarre. It's, it's, I mean, if you're putting asses in seats, then, you know, you have a certain amount of latitude. And as, as we have seen. And then there's some weird expectations that develop with that about what you're, you know, how you're entitled to behave because no one has ever said no. Um, And so I told Dr. Like, I can't do it. And that's how Logan and Dave worked with him on the next two movies, which were Watchmen and Sucker Punch. Yep. And so I was away from, so when I was at that point, you know, sort of 2006, 2007, I was really just, you know, in the gym in Salt Lake, starting to teach our first public seminars.

And then doing a lot of still doing a lot of military work. And so the clothing system thing was done. We made this educational DVD that everybody who got a system got the DVD about how to wear it. And, you know, what combinations to use and what situations. It was quite comprehensive. And I think the IMAQ thing was getting developed at that time. And then also parallel to that, we were doing an R&D project. for PJs to basically miniaturize a bunch of climbing equipment.

So for a confined space rescue or, you know, raising or lowering a patient and, you know, this sort of steep terrain kind of stuff. And that was another thing. That system needed a lot of education. And actually, Josh, who from Iron Mountain, who met here, he said, oh, yeah, I got, I got introduced that system. He goes, but nobody taught us how to use it. So we were all really kind of afraid of it.

The classic military tale. Yeah. This thing's awesome. does anybody in here know how to use this? Exactly. To include with weapon systems sometimes. I don't doubt it. I mean, and yeah, it was a very, and it was like, okay, you want, you want to cut the weight in half.

You want to reduce the size by this much. You want to, you know, all of these things. And it's like, it all comes at a cost. There's a reason the tires are on the Formula One car for a very limited amount of time. And with this system, if you, you know, the rope, I mean, it was all based around a 6.4-mill rope. that, you know, here's the deal. You need to, if this gets pulled out of the packaging and used, it gets thrown away. Yeah, one-time use.

Yeah. Yeah, that's it because you can't inspect it. You don't know what's happened to it. There's, yeah, it's, you can spill whatever solvent on it you want. It's probably going to be inert to, you know, it probably won't respond to that. But some other stuff, yeah, there's going to be, anyway. I didn't go back to the movie business until 2011. when Zach, he's masterful, he said he had a job that he didn't trust anyone else to do.

It's an interesting term to describe Zach. I don't know him that well. I've only been around him a few times, but I generally appreciate his personality for sure. Yeah. Yeah, he'll be sitting in that seat soon. Excellent. We have a discussion scheduled about his next project. Awesome.

Yeah, it'll be. But, and he, he's kind of tricked me. You know, he knew exactly what to say because he'd talked to, he'd called Lisa first. And he's like, I know if I call Mark, he's going to say no. And, uh, he's playing chess. Oh, fuck yeah. I was so far down the road. He's gathering intel on the side.

Yep. And he's, and it was, and the way that he pitched it, you know, after Lisa's counseling, he's just like, I don't, I don't trust anyone else to do this. In fact, it's so hard, I don't think anybody else can do it. I'm like, maybe even you. Excuse me? Say that again? You doubt my ability.

Oh, no, no, no, I don't. I just don't. I just, and within two days, I was out in L.A. for a meeting. Well played by Zach. Oh, fuck, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And for a variety of reasons, and that was the man of steel job. For a variety of reasons, that was an incredible experience. Because it was, uh, unfortunately, 11 months essentially away from home. And, and then done with that job and basically home for three weeks

and then gone again. I mean, it's a lifestyle that comes with consequences. And those are pretty obvious to me now. Yeah. But yeah, so the bike thing started 2007. I raced okay that year. But really 2009, 2010. 2010 was sort of the breakthrough year where, you know,

I actually finally won a race, which it turns out it's not easy to do. And then, you know, one of the big ones, like in Tour of Park City, which that's that version of it was 150 miles and 7 or 8,000 feet of climbing or whatever, basically a little six, a little over six hours for me. Where, you know, we shattered the 85 miles in. six of us, you know, just dropped everybody. The field of 80 or something starting in our master's category and shattered the field there, stayed, you know, together as six

over the top of Bald Mountain Pass. So you go over a pass that's over 10,000 feet on that race. So we dropped Sean by accident there and then Dwayne down. So we went into the finish four up and I ran, you know, I was second by half a wheel. And I think that, you know, be cool to win, but still that was, that's probably like one of the best races that I've done. And then 2011, because we were, I raced a little bit in Illinois, we were, because ACA nationals were. And that's where you were for the movie stuff, right?

Yeah, part of, so the movie stuff happens at, you know, different locations. Some of them nice, some of them less nice. So Man of Steel, I started, I was in Pasadena for about two and a half months and did a fuck ton of riding. Yeah, there's some of the right spots. there. Jesus. So good. And then, and then we moved from there to, I think we were probably three months, June, July, August, three and a half months or so just outside of Chicago. Pan flat. I mean, when Michael and I did one ride there was like 102 miles and just over a thousand feet of climbing, which I can get in. Like being back in your garage. Yes. Well, the difference is like it's cornfield, cornfields on one side, soybeans on the other. And then they flip flop. And then they flip flop. Yeah. So when you're out there, are you just tasked with keeping Henry on track? Are you just, are you basically turning him and crafting him into what they want him to look like on the screen?

Yes. I mean, it's like, so he came to that movie fresh off of immortal. Well, no, he did immortals where he got down, he's whatever, six feet, six one or something. He got down to 170 for immortals. So he was super fucking lean, like not eating and just doing a ton of fucking like Tabata, style body weight stuff. And then he did a movie right after that called Cold Light of Day where he wasn't supposed to be lean,

so he went on the beer and pizza diet. And so when I got to, he had never like thought too much about, you know, like the physical activity thing wasn't, you know, that had to be talked. Like the continuous thing and the paying attention.

So I told Zach, I said, how long is the shoot? And the shoot is six months, basically 122 days, I think. for that one. And he has to be held it.

Whatever condition he gets in on August 1st, so the first day of shooting, he's got to be in, you know. It's got to look the same throughout the movie. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I said, okay, if the condition needs to be that stable, then I need to have, you know, a lot of time in advance. So basically I was with him, you know, four months.

Michael was with me on that also because we had, we essentially had four people on that job to train. So go from 300 where we had like 35 guys to this one where we had three, three males and one female. And yeah, I mean, it was basically an exercise in bodybuilding essentially because, you know, every superhero, you know, worth his salt has. Better have some traps. Yeah, but not too big. But it's broad shoulders, narrow waist seem to be the thing. Like, and if you shoulders had, you know, you got to have a neck.

it's a there's a there's a there's an aesthetic there especially for the female so because you know the long slender neck it's a it's a it's a natural eye catching sort of you know whatever anyway so so so I by the end of that Henry had been with us for 11 months um you think you'll continue to do that or have you had enough of the oh I'm done yeah yeah much the same way that I I stopped climbing. I just, I, you know,

after, after Justice League was done, I, I spent a couple of months in Australia with Jason on the Aquaman movie, uh, but realized like, there's a cost to it.

There's a cost to it. And, and I'm not, like I've, I've hit the high point already. Like as far as what I'm going to, like, because for me,

I mean, I didn't, I didn't really talk about that, those jobs as much as, you know, people who, have done less, spray more,

I guess. I would say unless people actively researched it, it would be hard. It wouldn't be hard, but they would have to research to find your name associated with it as compared to the opposite,

like you described, maybe a peripheral involvement allowing people to think that they had a deeper involvement. Yeah. You were quiet about it, for sure. Yeah,

because I don't think it's, because, A, it's somebody else's privacy, but B, it's, it's like, well, it's just what we do. And I don't care who the person is. And you might hold them up because they're going to be on the screen.

And you're going to da-da-da. They're still superheroes. You know, it's still sort of make-believe. Although we did, you know, we do bring a very serious notion of reality into those jobs. And that's why we have been quite successful with it is because of the standards that we set and then impose and then it's 24-7 essentially. So it's building up the physical body. It's changing them psychologically. It's being in their face.

I mean, when I trained Gaul for the original appearance as Wonder Woman, which was in the Batman versus Superman movie, I was, let's see, I lived for three and a half months across the street from her home in Tel Aviv. Really? Yeah. Part of the reason for that is. is because her husband owned that little boutique 10-room hotel at the time.

So it was very convenient. That helps. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I, I, yeah, I was meant to go for two weeks, and then the movie got pushed by three months, and so I ended up being there for three and a half months. And so there was all, you know, there's like there's no getting away.

And, and, and we, you know, meet and walk to the car and go to the gym in the mornings. and sometimes we'd train again in the afternoons and sometimes it would involve, you know, eating and together. I mean, it's a very unusual relationship to develop with someone. It's an intimate relationship. I mean, I owned a gym for a couple of years,

and yeah, if you really want to. That's right. I did. I'm a jack of all trades. Yeah. And an absolute master of none. But it's, yeah, it's an intimate relationship to get involved,

especially if they want to, I mean, there's the window shopping version. Like, yeah, I'll pay you X amount dollars per hour and this is the result that I'm looking for. That's the lowest level of entry and that there's no intimacy really. That's transactional. Yes. But yeah, people who really like, hey, I need to tell you about how I got to this point of my life. And this is what I'm looking at doing and I need it to be deeper. Yeah, there's a level of intimacy there that goes beyond your normal interaction for sure.

Yeah. And to the point where some of these, some of the. the relationships definitely have an expiration date. Yep. Because, you know, no one really wants to be pushed that hard all the time. And if there's an option, you know, for the actual Wonder Woman movie, I did not train gall. Yep. And, I mean, I started with her for a couple months.

She was on another job in Atlanta. And it was really hard to work around that. But, you know, she needed someone with a different. that didn't have history. And someone who was willing to be a little bit more flexible than I was in terms of how much time and attention that I could give or whatever. But I had, you know, a bunch of other Amazon's. Yeah. I mean, on that job.

And there were, you know, just go, you know, I had, Danny Houston was the one male that I trained on that job. He was, you know, in London for like three weeks. For, you know, a couple times a week we train him. But the rest of it, you know, 30 plus women. And, you know, I consider that probably. Yeah, that and one client on Justice League. Like, okay, if I never do one of these jobs ever again, these high points, this that I've learned, you know,

and I joke about it, but it really is, it's not exercise physiology, it's exercise psychology. Because if I can manipulate, cajole, coach, teach, whatever someone behavior and attitude, then physical shit's super easy. I used to describe personal training as 80% therapist, 20% trainer. Yeah.

It's, yeah. I mean, I have my own motivations as do you, and it's the really effective trainers can navigate through your bullshit and figure out where the actual drive and end state is. Because I also found it was different than the people would express.

They say they want this, and then like a month down the road, you're like, I think you might have misplaced energy. Yes. Directed somewhere else. It was challenging. I enjoyed it, but I never do it again either.

I mean, I have a hard enough time motivating myself. I don't have the emotional or mental horsepower to put it in to train other people again. And it is, and it can be, you know, quite a costly relationship in a way that, and, and not in a negative sense. It's cost, it's cost something. It's a, it's energy out, it's thought. It's a lot of things that. Yep. And so, and for me, the epiphany was, you know, I was in Australia at one point.

And actually, Selena was able to come with me for my second visit down there. And I just thought, I'm only here for the paycheck. And that's not a good enough reason for me to keep doing this. Even if, you know, she can be with me all the time. You know, part of it, you know, the reason to stop was I did Wonder Woman and Justice League back to back. And so I was in London for 14 months and Selena was here with her medical practice. and we see each other once a month, basically. I'd other, you know, she'd come.

It's not easy, yeah. And I just, I decided that, okay, this is, she is too important. Like, I'd rather give up this income and whatever, you know, kudos or, you know, bullshit social status apparently is supposed to come with it, um, in order to, you know, to be around her and, you know, in her life and vice versa. So, yeah, multiple reasons that I decided not to do it. and it actually coincided nicely with Zach's departure from the whole, you know, superhero universe.

And he's actually, you know, he's working on the, what's gonna be the fucking magnum opus. And we'll, and like, it's more serious work in a way. I mean, not that, you know, he didn't take that seriously, but still in the end, it's comic book characters. And so you have a lot more latitude. All around. You can bend, historic reality.

You can create your own reality. Truly, they got capes on. I mean, come on. Yeah. So you can suspend all that. The Spartans wore capes, man. Are we sure they did? We are not sure.

I just saw the movie. I don't know. I know they had shields and swords. Yeah. You know what's funny about that movie? Seeing those capes too in real life. They color corrected them later. Yeah.

They were nowhere near that red in real life. Shh. That's all right. Nobody's going to see the behind the scenes. Welcome to the real movie. world because yeah so I got one more for you oh boy because I mean we're coming up on three hours this has actually been awesome and this is the first of oh for sure yeah yeah because for sure fuck so here's and I ask this question because I'm struggling with this one too I think a little bit

at all the stuff that you've done you know you started off um say as an alpinist and then an author and then into the business world and then a gym owner a trainer I know you guys are working on a bunch of stuff now, a podcaster now. How do you describe yourself? And another way to ask it would be, what would, if somebody comes to you and say is, hey, Mark, what do you do for a living? Like, I'm struggling with that one, because I have gone down some ridiculous tangents as well, too. And I think I struggle with it because I have no idea where I'm going. So I really don't have an idea how to describe what I do or what I've done. But you, you know, you know, you know, You've done exponentially more than me,

so I'm curious, because I'm basically, what I'm looking for is a good answer that I could steal. Okay. I give you the answer that you can't steal. I mean, you can, but it might not. I'll borrow it. But, well, whatever.

I mean, I just don't think it's a useful answer. For me, in a way, that's why I said you can't steal it because you'll just be like, that's bullshit. A searcher? Yeah. Like, I don't know what it is, because I, don't honestly the the sort of means that are in front of

me that are that I've found that you know I've used as vehicles to learn not only about myself but stuff you know the world around I don't want to you know yes I am I'm no longer a climber

I'm of it you know I came from there who made me you shaped you know I mean the climbing shaped in the lessons of the mountains and and the serious nature of it, in a sense, you know, shape my ideas about a lot of things. So I'm of it, but I don't practice that anymore. And so I can't say that.

And I can't, I could say, I'm a writer, but then the problem with that is, and people are like, what are you right? I'm like, oh, I don't know. You're still writing, though. I mean, I'm still, yeah. Yeah, I mean, but it's not a thing. If somebody said, hey, what's up with this whole nonprofit business?

What are you doing? You know, you'd Michael, you know, you got this zine that you make and you're doing this podcast and now, hopefully within the next, yeah, in two months, you know, we'll publish, there'll be a book out. And so I joke and I say, I think we started a publishing company, but I don't really want it to be that. I want it, you know, necessarily. It's just that it can't help but be that. Like I can't stop any of this right now. It has momentum. So I can't, I can't, I can't, I don't want to be, you know, I'm a publisher.

I'm a podcaster. I'm a this, I'm a that. Because I, because the pigeonhole thing never worked that well except when I was climbing and only climbing. Yeah. So I don't. I just, um, you think the search, do you think the searching will ever end for you? Oh, no. I don't think it will for me either.

I think that might be the best term. I would say wanderer, but it's more, it's more, that implies. That implies a sense of bouncing off the walls. Yeah. Whereas I like to think, I like to think I can see the walls and try to avoid them most times. Try and avoid hitting, yeah. Even though I've had contact once or twice. But I like, I like searcher.

I struggle with that one. My least favorite question is when people say, hey, what do you do for living? Yeah. I don't, you know yourself employed. I mean, yeah. I mean, that's the Twitter answer for an elevator. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, what, and I'll take the opportunity in the future to turn this back around on you. So we don't have to hit that, you know, radical right now. I was just curious if you had, I mean, because I'm sure you get, you've just done so many things and you've done it at a level in each of those things that I think is atypical for a lot of people. I, there is a lot of I could have and should have done better. but I guess thank you. I don't know how to respond to that, but searcher, you know, or seek, whatever. Yeah, Wanderer, that just got fucking.

It implies no compass. Gandalf all over it or whatever, you know, but without, with the staff with no magic. If you keep your hair going, though, oh. I mean, I can Photoshop a little bit here. Yeah. I'm, so it all,

yeah, I'm going to bring back the mullet. Okay. It's been said a few times just because, you know, it goes with pit fiber sunglasses, and I guess there is. I did read recently about a mullet festival, which could only happen in Australia, but does. It's an annual thing. I like it. And there's some proud.

Anyway, it's kind of a joke. I just stopped cutting it at one point. And then I'm like, huh. Well, I still have it. So the opportunity, you know, starts falling out. Yeah, you still got it, you know. You still got time. Yeah.

I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, let me turn one around just for a second. I mean, we talked a little bit about, um, obviously we've been, you know, in both your career, uh, first and second, let's say. Yeah. Um, and mine, we've been, you know, around some risk. which I believe is essential, you know, whether it's social or physical or whatever, but, you know, in terms of keeping us sharp, making us pay attention and be present.

Obviously, that comes with, you know, knowing people, being around people who, you don't come back. And then, I mean, we touched on it briefly of like, you go on after that. Yeah. Is, you know, it's an interesting thing to explore. I would, I try not to, you know, a certain point in life I dwell on it more.

I try not to now. There was a, in my old multimedia presentations, I always ended. There's a passage basically, you know, celebrating people who aren't around. And it always finished with a list. And I stopped giving those shows. and I stopped with my list, 1999 when Alex Lowe got killed because he was number 40 on my list of dead friends

and climbing partners. And if I just stay with climbing in that family or tribe, if you will, it's probably because it's 99, it's, you know, we're closer to 60 than to 50 and then had military students, many of whom were climbing partners, many of whom, you know, did some pretty cool stuff with. You know, it's a lot of people who aren't here anymore.

And sometimes, you know, I dwell on that just because of, and it's always because my life is less rich. It's always because of, you know, I did a, done a couple of fundraising things. and one of them was a thing for the Brian Bill's family had put together, which is Little Warriors, which is an organization that takes kids from the command. His dads aren't around now to take him out fishing, to take him out into the mountains and hiking and climbing and stuff like that.

And that to me is like the part of the biggest tragedy is like, I got, yeah, my dad left when I was 10, but I got fucking lucky because there was the phone. and even if he's, you know, and so when those guys get, you know, die, you know, the follow on is a lot different than if I had splotted, you know, when I was in my early 20s as a climber. Because that's just, you know, it's a cleanup problem. It's not, you know, there's, there's no ties.

There's this, yeah, a few people are going to be hurt, but it didn't really, hadn't really been around long enough to have a positive effect or whatever, meaningful effect on people. and and being but being around that a lot of in parts of you know my life where I'd manage relationships and there's actually a chapter in kiss or kill about a relationship I had with Fred V. Mal who for the first two years you know I was cordial with him he's a cool kid but I knew he's going to he's going to get it you know he was going to get chopped and And so it would be, if he was an acquaintance, it'd be easier.

It hurts less. Yeah. It hurts less. Yeah. It's just, oh, is it, you know, his kid who was moving too fast, you know, or whatever. And something happened that we ran into each other somewhere and ended up basically spending the last three weeks before he got killed, going climbing, hanging out. He got along with my girlfriend at the time, you know, really well, was an amazing three weeks that when he got killed made me realize it could have been two years and three weeks

that I had that relationship with him. It didn't hurt any, you know, if it would have maybe hurt more after two years and three weeks than it did after like three solid, you know, weeks together. But it was, that was the thing that really made me realize

like, well, fuck it, it's just feeling. Right. And I'm okay. Good feeling, bad feeling. I want that. I want that emotional experience. I don't necessarily want it to be from that source. Yeah. But I recognize that, look, I'm protecting myself from potential sensation because that sensation might, you know, be negative or whatever. And, uh, and I started living a bit more fully at that point rather than like segregating people out just because they, you know, I figured they're not going to be around. for that long. Well, none of us are going to be around for that long. Some of us, you know, maybe too long. Who knows? But with that idea of like, how do you go on? It's, these days, it's just, it's so much a piece of life that it, and a piece of my life, that it seems pretty normal. You're talking about death? Yes. Yeah. And normal to, to have it happen. I mean, if we talk about Alex, you know, my,

my exposure to him was, you know, Yosemite trip, pretty much. And, but when I read that, oh, I am not, I'm not, I'm no longer surprised. Yeah. You know, in a way, like it's,

so it's such a part now that, I mean, I don't want to be callous about, it because that's also a form of sort of avoiding feeling and then it's self-protection and there are certain things that um but to it's how to how to you know behave in the aftermath or how do you continue how do you go back to the thing it's by way uh it's it's by way of honoring that person the relationship the experiences that had together that like you don't get to change who you are because of what happened to someone else and that it could happen to, you know, you or to someone even closer or whatever. But it's like, okay, I need to continue

in, you know, in style, if you will, because that, the way that I conduct myself is what brought me into relationship with that person in the first place. Yeah. So I don't, I don't get to change that. And um, and, um, and nor can I force stuff.

It's, it's, uh, like I, I, I try, you know, a,

a silly calendar reminder reminders sometimes in my phone about, oh. Yeah, it's August 6th again or it's Memorial Day or it's, you know, yeah,

oh, it's December again, fuck, you know. And, and, but it, but I don't,

I think I'm less morbid about it now, partially because of the sadly persistent exposure. Yeah, there's something to be said for that, for sure. I mean, I think the community that you come from, you're going to expose to it far more likely and frequently than people driving down the street. Yeah, but I think base culture is not dissimilar. And there's, I mean, there's definitely some crossover. There's a, yeah, a girl who is a really good climber.

The staff Davis, who, you know, now she's jumping and flying pretty much every day. And still going climbing. And, you know, she was married to Dean. And obviously that was in Yosemite, you know, with, I think a guy's name was Graham was with him, I believe. I believe that's the name, yeah. Yeah. And for, you know, for that, that's like one of those things where I know exactly where I was sitting in a fucking Whole Foods parking lot in Atlanta when that message came through on the phone. It's like, okay, that's a bit too immediate. That was what, it's not been 24 fucking hours yet. That was the situation I had with Alex largely. I was out in the middle of nowhere camping with my family, no cell coverage.

and we started our drive back into town. And as soon as we had cell coverage, my phone just blew up. Yeah. And I was looking at the names of the people who were texting me. And before I read any of the texts, I was able to piece together what had happened because I went through the Rolodex like you were talking about,

like, okay, who's jumping right now, who's overseas? And the only person that we knew on all of those texts. Oh, that everybody who had texted you. Correct. And a lot of them were just, hey, give me a call. You know, because it, you know, they wanted to talk face-to-face. face and then one of them just was, hey, did you hear about Alex? And it's like, fuck, I did now. Yeah, I did. Yeah. And it was on my sister's birthday. You know, so it's a day I'll never forget for

sure. And, you know, I don't know if I'm at that phase where I'm less morbid about it. I mean, I think, I think often about the guys on extortion from the perspective of, you know, if you and I had not met and I had not left that command, there's a good likelihood I would have been on that helicopter. Yeah. And I understand the wake that was left behind, like you're talking about the families. And I can, and I'll catch myself, not often, but occasionally overlaying that to my own family.

And in a random moment, I'm sitting there like, you know, what would be different? What would their life be different? What would my kids remember about me? What would they not remember? What massive fuckups that I had as a father would ruin them for the rest of their life that I didn't have the chance to course, correct? And it's tough. And then with Alex, I mean, like we were talking about,

I'm probably in the most unsafe position I am right now to jump, which is why my jumping stuff is just, it's shelved specifically based jumping because my initial feeling that I feel like I'm dealing with is anger. But what I think it really is is fear. Because I shared so much of those experiences, and we were there at that time period when, you know, people were going in.

And it's just funny, again, to go back to the razor blade, we're sitting on it, bleeding, talking ourselves into how other people are bleeding more and how we're going to be okay. And isn't that a beautiful sunset? Fuck. Yeah. I mean, all joking aside, yeah.

I mean, but it's also, so I would venture to say it's also hard when, you know, people are, I give it something that's beyond your control. Okay, fine, you know, of extortion, for example. Yeah, that's just, that's just, yeah. That is actual math catching up at some point. Yeah.

And then, but, okay, let's say within the little subculture, let's say based subculture or climbing subculture, where like, okay, I know these guys, and some of them are, you know, on the periphery, and that'll never happen to me because this, you know, we touched on that. When they're that close, when they're up here, when they're but for the grace of God, go I,

I think it's much harder. Yeah, because, and maybe that thing is, you know, fear in a sense of like it fucking could have been me. I think that's what I struggle with the most is the realization that I'm struggling with, have I been talking myself into something blindly as opposed to looking at it? Have I been looking at what I choose to do with my eyes closed? Yeah. Essentially. And painting a picture, even though my eyes are closed and telling my brain this is what I see,

this is what I'm capable of. or do I need to open my fucking eyes and take another look at this? I mean, I may well hang it up. I don't know which direction it's going to go, but I know if I go right now, if I were to go base jumping, I think I'd be fine, scott diving,

but if I go base jumping, I'll be making decisions in a compromised state. Yeah. And I'll want to go harder because I am pissed, you know? I wish she was alive so I could kick his ass. Yep. Yeah. And that anger would, like, you know what?

God damn I'm gonna fly this line faster and lower and it's like that's wrong it's incorrect and all I really have been able to work through

so far is that I know I'm in that spot so this stuff says locked away and that's as far as I've gotten with it there's a point I remember

and it's just come up several times you know the guy peers of mine who yeah they go up you know to solo something to sort out

some emotional shit you know and you get like highly focused or whatever. I mean, there's been some cool shit down in the mountains fueled by that anger or that angst or that breakup or whatever. But stuff, the difference, the reason that we can't quite meet on the thing is the speed with which stuff happens in your world

versus my old world, if you will, of climbing. Where, okay, when, yeah, once shit starts going bad in the mountains, it can escalate really quickly. Yep. Like it can, it can sort of just as soon as there's a bit of momentum, you know,

uh, but oftentimes it takes a really long time to get to that point. Yeah. Like if it's happening super, you know, yeah, you might just be, I was,

you know, I was just walking along and a rock fell and fucking, you know, kill me. That's pretty quick. That's, that's pretty, that's pretty quick.

Um, but if it's a sequence of decisions that put, in a place that you can't get back from kind of situation or or you know the storm that you thought you could sit out but actually got worse and worse and worse to the point where you can't go up or down and you just well we got to try yeah because we're now out of food I mean one of the big routes in Pakistan that we tried to do yeah we got caught from a storm 1200 feet below the summit and and we had run out of food that day essentially and um we had you know enough fuel to get to make water but well we got to try to get down and for me the easy point on that

was like one of the guys was kind of was ward was altitude sick um it had been for a little bit and it's like well it's the gods need to human sacrifice i know who it's going to be that's so dark but it was It was my way of rationalizing behavior that we were going to undertake anyway. Yeah. And it's like, you know, it won't happen to me because it's going to be him because he's the, you know, or whatever. That's, whether that's true or not or whatever. And then some, you know, all four of us came back from that, but some really crazy shit happened.

But that, the anger is, yeah, I won't go away for a little bit. Yeah. but I commend you for recognize the condition that you're in emotionally and just saying look it's not I don't need whatever it is that I would go jump off is going to still be jumpable

it's not going anywhere yeah which is same thing in the mountains like okay the mountain's gonna be there I mean just you know if it's not good now and and and I can always come back and if I don't come you know what's the risk of not coming you know what if I don't come back

to this mountain and I don't get to climb this mountain. Oh, poor you. You know what I mean? It's like, is my life going to be any fucking different if I, if I, if I, if I go and jump this same exit yet again, you know. Or if I never jump again. Or if I, you know, like really is my, that's what I, you know, I'm talking to myself. Like, what's more valuable?

That risk or being here for my kids for decades, you know, it's a tough. That's an easy answer. It is an easy answer. It's an, internally, it's tougher than just. saying that like you know there's a pull and push and it's yeah I mean it's just so it's so fresh I mean I've had kids for as long as I've been jumping you know it's a and it's a but it again was I on the razor blade bleeding more than I thought that I got to figure that out first and the first step for me is get the fuck off the razor blade yeah yeah that's where I am fucking out man

yeah um round one yeah I think I think uh that seems like a semi-logical Yeah point to exit on I'm glad we linked up Yeah me too honored that you Pop in the Cherry

Exactly exactly Now I'm gonna be everywhere Yeah you will be No I don't I only I just want to have good conversations Yeah And you know to go on

Yeah It's easy to get diluted Yep and and it's easy to I think when we were talking about the scheduling part you know to sort of you know succumb to that pressure of oh I need to record something I mean someone to record because it happened in here

the other day we were just like we've got to sit down and record and then in the end I'm just like you guys that was fucking bullshit I'm not even gonna and then but everybody sees it differently and recognizes their participation differently and here's something that the other person might and and so Michael Ross went through and they're like, there's really good lessons.

I remember we still were talking about this and like, yeah, it's true. Yeah. But there was a dick joke right before that or, you know, whatever. Sometimes there's dick jokes. Yeah. Yeah. Fucking hell. Well, I'm glad A to link up.

Hell yeah. B that you're around. See that you got the fuck out of Southern California. Oh, God. Should have done a decade ago. I'm a slow learner, apparently. Okay. Hell yeah, it's been good.

Until next time, my friend. Thank you. Until next time. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you as always. I would not want to do this podcast as much as I do and look forward to it as much as I do if it wasn't from the feedback that I receive from those of you out there who are listening to this. And I have the ability to look at the back end numbers

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